Extremely accurate timepiece crossword8/17/2023 ![]() When the men who survived came home, they retained the habit. But the innovation proved extremely useful for coordinating troop movements.īy World War I, watches were standard-issue gear for soldiers in the trenches. Going into battle with feminine jewelry might have struck the men of war as uniform malfunction. But in colonial campaigns like the First Boer War and the Third Burmese War, British commanders tied little clocks to their soldiers’ wrists. In the late 1800s, watches were considered to be feminine jewelry men kept their timepieces tucked away in pockets. The British Empire didn’t merely help perfect the modern timepiece but also helped to popularize the watch. For his pains-he spent about 30 years designing and tweaking the timepieces-he won a luxurious prize from the British government. They were precise and durable enough to withstand the ricketty journey across the ocean. His timepieces didn’t rely on the dripping of water, flow of sand, or even the swinging of heavy pendula. The subject of the classic book Longitude by Dava Sobel, Harrison became famous for building the two most advanced clocks (technically: chronometers) of all time. ![]() The scenario above isn’t a hypothetical it’s precisely the calculation that Harrison made. So, for each hour that the two clocks were apart, the ship had traveled 15 degrees west-or about 900 nautical miles, which is roughly the distance between New York City and Missouri a time zone. As you know, the earth rotates 360 degrees every 24 hours. As a result, the time difference between the two clocks grows as the ship sails toward the Americas. The second clock is reset to noon each day on the ocean when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. The first clock keeps perfect London time throughout the journey. Imagine that a ship departs from London for Jamaica with two clocks. To John Harrison, an English carpenter, it was clearly a problem of time. To some, this seemed like a problem of orientation. As a result, they would crash into rocks or get lost and run out of food. Toward the end of the Exploration Age, the great powers like England, France, and Spain struggled to navigate the oceans, because they couldn’t accurately measure longitude, or their progress east or west of their site of departure. The most important breakthroughs in the history of horology required the incentives and resources of a global empire. On a cold day, the water might freeze, and so would time. But slight changes in temperature could change the viscosity of water and the rate of drips. To work around this problem, some of these ancient civilizations used a “water clock,” or clepsydra, a device that steadily dripped water through a small hole into a container with lines painted around the side to represent the passage of time. In ancient Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia, sundials, or “shadow clocks,” all required bright sunlight to count the hours, which wasn't of much use on overcast days. Long before the modern clock used springs and familiar markings, just about every great civilization had attempted to measure time, with each one failing in its own special way. The history of timepieces is a history of empires. Third, the industrial economy necessitated new labor laws, which changed the way people think about work. Second, the invention of the railroad required the standardization of time across countries, replacing the local system of keeping time using shadows and sundials. First, the conquest of foreign territories across the ocean required precise navigation with accurate timepieces. Three forces contributed to the modern invention of time. acronym comes from the post-World War II era. Happy hour is a neologism from the 1950s, a heyday for workplace optimism. Retirement, as a term, dates back to the 1600s, as it relates to army service, but its modern usage only became mainstream after the move to an industrial economy. The word weekend is a creation of the industrial revolution, since a discrete working week doesn't make much sense on a farm that needs constant tending. Each of these are distinct periods of time, and each is an invention of the last 150 years of economic change. Just think: What do you look forward to when you’re at work? Maybe it’s a happy hour, the weekend, or, in the more distant future, retirement.
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