The Measurement of Time

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2012

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the measurement of time. Early civilisations used the movements of heavenly bodies to tell the time, but even in the ancient world more sophisticated timekeeping devices such as waterclocks were known. The development of mechanical clocks in Europe emerged in the medieval period when monks used such devices to sound an alarm to signal it was the hour to pray, although these clocks did not tell them the time. For hundreds of years clocks were inaccurate and it proved hard to remedy the problems, let alone settle on a standard time that the country should follow. It was with the advent of the railways that time finally became standardised in Britain in the mid-19th century and only in 1884 that Greenwich became the prime meridian of the world. Atomic clocks now mark the passing of the days, hours, and minutes and they are capable of keeping time to a second in 15 million years. With:Kristen LippincottFormer Director of the Royal Observatory, GreenwichJim BennettDirector of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of OxfordJonathan BettsSenior Curator of Horology at the Royal Observatory, GreenwichProducer: Natalia Fernandez.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for learning the in our time podcast for more details about in our time and for our terms of use
0:05.4	Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program
0:12.4	Hello, we'll be talking about time you can't stop it you can't touch it
0:16.1	But it threatens to take over our lives
0:18.0	And it's hard to imagine a time when the days and nights were not developed weren't divided up into the hours and minutes
0:23.8	That we know today. It was only in the late 19th century that time was standardized
0:28.1	Globary and the glenic was chosen as the location of the prime meridian the history of the measurement of time is a long one
0:35.3	From earlier man tracing his days from sunrise to sunset to the advent of atomic clocks in the 1950s
0:41.9	We've constantly striven to calculate and control the time
0:46.0	But how did mechanisms for measuring time develop into such precise machines and how did the changes in society
0:52.6	Drive the need for such precise time keeping with me to discuss the history of the measurement of time are
0:58.6	Kristen Lippincott former director of the Royal Observatory
1:01.8	Greenwich Jim Bennett director of the Museum of the history of science at the University of Oxford and Jonathan Betts
1:08.7	Senior curator of herology at the Royal Observatory
1:12.2	Greenwich Kristen Lippincott how did early earliest civilizations measure using the natural phenomenon measure time?
1:20.4	Well, I think the thing one has to do because it's so hard to think about time without thinking about watches
1:25.6	But imagine that you're primitive man and what you're noticing going around you and essentially the first thing you're going to notice is the sun
1:32.7	Because that separates the light into the dark
1:35.4	Then you start to notice the phases of the moon and then finally you start to notice the regular cycle of the stars
1:42.8	So you can see in all of these ancient people's minds
1:46.4	They had three different components that were
1:50.9	Naturally dividing up their day
	...

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