One thing that’s important to understand (lots of good answers but I feel this wasn’t really addressed aside from the Industrial Revolution joke) is that precision wasn’t that important for most people in most situations. Stars, candles, sundials, etc. were perfectly acceptable because you just needed to have a general idea of what time of day it was.
It wasn’t until trains, the Industrial Revolution, set work days, etc. that knowing time down to the minute or even second was all that critical. Waging a war? Send a signal/rider/etc. at approximately the right time so everyone is coordinated. Need to get up to farm? Have an open window so the sun shines in or some chickens or some other loud animal that gets up at dawn or near-dawn.
Most people just slept at night unless they had a specific task that required it to be dark out. But again, precision wasn’t all that critical. Sun goes down, approximate, do what you need to do.
The stars have a very predictable pattern to them, ancient people had nothing better to do at night than look up, and since there was no light pollution it was quite a show.
Depending on the time of year, some constellations would be visible all night and move across the sky. That’s where the original Zodiac signs came from.
This past winter, I started using Orion as a clock while I was out walking the dogs in the evenings. Got pretty good and could guesstimate the time to within about 30 minutes.
That only works until about 3 am or so, but if I was out more often that late, I could probably just pick a different constellation.
How long do you spend walking your dogs!? Just look at the clock when you go out and won’t you still be accurate to within 30 minutes when you get back?
What I meant was that I started noticing Orion’s position in the sky at certain relatively fixed times. After a while, I could just look at where it was, relative to the horizon, and determine the current time within about 30 minutes (between about 5:30 PM and 3 AM when it’s above the horizon here)
It’s actually easier to tell the time using the stars rather than the sun, because the elevation of the sun is hard to estimate without using a device like a sundial; but there are always stars near enough to the horizon that their elevation can be estimated with the unaided eye.
In theory, yes. In practice, you only have to watch the first night, pick a recognizable star pattern. Follow it across the sky during the night and from then on you can use that first read as your reference. Specific stars, their names or whatever is irrelevant as long as you can find the same group of stars every night. Without light pollution it is trivially easier as far more stars are visible and constellations are obvious.
Oh hey! I actually read into this recently. It came from wondering what exactly “The Witching Hour” was, and apparently it was invented by Christians and it’s between 3am and 4am. I thought “oh hey that’s interesting when did that start?”, and then when I read that it may have started back in 1535 I was like “Wait how the fuck did they know it was 3am in 1535? When were clocks invented?!”
So then I was like “well how did they tell time at night before that?” and it ends up that all the way back in the 16th century BC, they had these things called water clocks. So basically, they had figured out the sun dial a few hundred years before that, and while tracking an hour, they had 2 vessels, one full of water and the other empty. They would have the water flow from one to the other so that when the top vessel was empty, x amount of time had passed (for sake of simplicity call it a hour), then they would pour the water back into the top vessel to measure the next hour, and they were able to do this without the sun. It was basically the same concept of an hourglass (which actually didn’t come around until 1000 AD) but with water.
And before sundials and water clocks? I dunno. I guess they just went to sleep when the sun went down, and woke up when it came up, and didn’t plan things around specific times. Sounds pretty nice, honestly.
Just spoke with a tour guide about this topic. If you lived in a city during the middle age in Europe, the night watch announced the current time every hour. How did they know the time? They just guessed, because nobody in the city could know better.
I grew up near train tracks and I can tell you that the ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk of a train safely passing late at night became a soothing sound because it was so normal and happened around the same time every night.
I imagine they just made sure to hire people to yell the hour who had a musical and soothing voice.
Precise time came to humanity with the railroad. Until then no one cared very much about whether it was 11:35 PM or “around midnight” or “way past bedtime.” Train timetables were the first thing that made minutes matter to the general public.
Mariners cared about time and preferred to be as precise as possible, but did pretty well telling local time by the stars. Finding longitude was a problem until good clocks came aling though.
Well if by “precise time” you mean “minute hands regularly being included in pocket/wristwatches” then yes. But we did have mechanical clocks for a couple hundred years by that point which were more precise than “around midnight” or “way past bedtime”. Given their linear nature, and measurement by the hour, even without a minute hand you could tell when it was quarter past, half past, quarter till an hour.
By analyzing how the values on the Sun Dial would change throughout the year due to the precession of the Earth’s axis, you can infer the length of night. However, once we realized that quartz is really good at defining a second, we were able to use oscillation as a means of telling time without sunlight.
Quartz? Quartz clocks are about 100 years old. You make it sound ljke we went from sundials to Casios lol. Mechanical clocks are around 1800 years old. Pendulum clocks around 500 years old and spring mechanical slightly younger.
If spring and pendulum clocks were only invented after 1300 years of clocks existing, how did clocks work before? Powered by a weight pulling down that has to be lifted back up every so often?
Moon position, it’s not as reproducible as the sun, but you can really see the moon moving through the sky.
Light, especially in summer, it starts to get night around 22, is pitch black at midnight around 3-4 you start to guess some light in the sky, at 5 it’s not day yet but you can see without a torch, and at 6 it’s bright.
Candle and fire-pit aren’t objective clock, but still a way to evaluate how much time has passed.
It’s funny you say candle, because there were actually fire clocks that were very accurate. They couldn’t tell you what time it was, but they could tell you very accurately how long they had been burning. If lit before nightfall and timed with a sundial, they were capable of rather precisely telling what time it was at night.
Similarly, sand clocks have been a thing for thousands of years. Think hourglass, but with different size holes and made of different materials with larger volumes.
We think sand clocks have only been in use since the middle ages, and the reason they were invented is pretty interesting. (At least in Europe; I’ve looked into this before and couldn’t find any other sources, but I may just not have looked hard enough).
For reasonably accurate time keeping, people had been using water clocks since at least the 16th century BCE. Basically the same idea as a sand clock, but water, which was slightly easier to feed into a reservoir. We don’t think sand clocks really saw any use until the 13th or 14th century CE. Mostly, people needed to keep more accurate time on ships as oceanic voyages became more common, but the movement of the vessel messed up a water clock too badly to be useful, and pendulums had the same problem. So, enter a sand clock! Basically the same idea as a water clock, but way less prone to errors from the ship’s movement.
Ooo, you touched on one of my favorite clock history tidbits, Maritime timekeeping. It is so fascinating. Like, the only reason spring-driven rotational oscillation mechanisms were invented was for maritime clocks. They were needed for accurate longitudinal calculations and really enabled the whole golden age of sailing. (yes, I am leaving out the Peloponnesian peoples, but they are a super awesome topic for another post)
They’re post is almost completely backwards. Early alarm clocks were nails put into the side of predictably burning candles, that would fall out when it burned down to a certain point, which would happen at a predictable time.
Additionally, while you could probably tell the time from the moon, that would require it actually being up that night/time and then understanding a lot of complicated things about it’s motion around us to have any sort of accuracy. I bet only a few astronomers have even been able to do this. Also it would be 100% reproducible because it’s not like the moon makes random movements, it’s perfectly predictable.
Would it be that complicated if people knew the lunar cycle, especially since the lunar cycle is fairly static? Not everyone I’m sure but those that needed a better time would probably understand and pass that knowledge along for the night folk. Of course depends when in technology we’re talking but I’d assume we humans understood those cycles pretty early for our survival, not in depth but they got the idea the lunar cycle didn’t change like the seasons did and adjust as needed. I haven’t read up on it so I’ll be glad to hear more info.
The issue with using the lunar cycle for timekeeping at night is that the moon is not always visible in the sky at night. It is also not at the same spot in the sky every night, so the math on describing the time based on moon position is actually pretty complex, and unreliable for a consistent overnight clock. You might think that tides could be used as well, but it that is even more complex. In fact, some of the first analog computers were created to do the calculus required to solve the question of timing and tides.
More accurate than moon position would be the position of the stars. Throughout the year, the stars around the Earth remain the same but as the Earth orbits the Sun, the Sun appears to be “in” different constellations as the Earth rotates, but it rotates at the same rate during the night as during the day. Each star rises and sets just like the Sun does, so by knowing which stars rose just as the Sun set, you can figure out the approximate time (approximate because it changes through the year).
Alternatively, the North Star and the stars around it appear to rotate once per day, so you could check the orientation of those stars to determine time, again by noting which part points towards the Sun.
The main interest of the moon position is that it’s a bright object, everybody knows. No need any specific knowledge. Now that while you had this conversion the moon moved a lot, so expect that so many hour have passed. It’s rough but sufficient
THE Big Dipper’s angle can be used to tell time at northern latitudes. It stays in the sky all night. I was told by a Blackfoot elder that they used it as a clock on clear nights.
The position changes with both time of night and time of year. Regular observers can tell time by the angle the constellation sits at.
An amusing way people used to wake up early was by drinking extra water before going to sleep. Their full bladder would wake them in the early morning hours (unless they overdid it, in which case they had to use the potty in the middle of the night and then overslept).
Animal noises. Most people had animals or lived near other people with animals, so the morning hours had a bunch of typical animal noises (animals, like humans, have an inner clock, and some animals are programmed to wake up before dawn).
Logs near the stove. A seasonal thing, but in winter, if you know you usually refill the stove 3 or 4 times during the night, you can tell how much of the night has passed through your wood stack.
The bi-phasic sleep thing also helped (take a good nap around noon, but also wake up at midnight and drink a beer with the neighbors). The point of midnight may have been rather arbitrary, though.
As far as I’m aware, candles were affordable, but the average person still couldn’t afford to burn down a candle every day to work or measure time, so once it got dark, normal work ceased and, at best, a family would meet in front of the stove and tell stories, knit or carve for a while.
An amusing way people used to wake up early was by drinking extra water before going to sleep. Their full bladder would wake them in the early morning hours (unless they overdid it, in which case they had to use the potty in the middle of the night and then overslept).
Star movements probably. They also knew how long certain things would burn for. There were even candles that would be marked specifically for hour counting.
Yup, the ancients loved stars. It was strangely common for multiple cultures to create these weird observatories that were mostly for observation of a single star associated with different seasons.
Mechanical options were usually used by people trying for some form of efficiency either social or to mark distance. Marking time on ships was very important for accurate mapping for instance.
As for most of society meeting up at a given time just took longer as everything was more of a rough estimate. Some of the accounts have been guessed at as people didn’t write details about how they approached time down. It’s been hazarded that the day marked your doing productive stuff period and you set out your routine for days in advance so people knew where to find you if not exactly when you’d be doing it. Evening was your social planning time where you’d meet up and share details of your to do list with the people who needed to know.
I once spent a week with a whole bunch of people camping on a big property for a Medieval recreation event where we had volunteer work to do on the property and agreed to attempt to explore time as our ancestors knew it. We all ditched our watches for two weeks. It was actually generally fairly relaxing? Everything moved a little slower but not by that much. There wasn’t any way to have much anxiety about not being precise so you just got used to people showing up during a wider span. If there was somewhere people needed to be around a specific time the person hosting the event just dispatched some runners to the places you knew people were going to be and people became more conversational as they passed along info. Actually very basic conversation had a lot more interest because passing along knowledge of what you knew was happening elsewhere became an actual topic of combined mutual interest instead of very boring comparisons of time tables.
It very much was! There were construction projects, games tournaments, arts… You’d think that the absence of clocks meant that people would be habitually miss things but I don’t think people did more than usual.
I recommend it. Experiencing that kind of temporality made me realize how much the mass adoption of clocks impacts our experiences. I never expected the degree to which I would pay more attention to the people around me.
Not sure how accurate this is, but in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, some monks stay up all night chanting so that they can wake up the other monks for morning prayers. So, the night monks chant a Hail Mary X number of times, and that takes them Y amount of time.
They actually didn’t for the most part, hour level divisions were mostly for the sake of tracking time in the daytime, when having that level of precision could be important for things like jobs or time sensitive tasks, but at night all that really mattered was that you got to bed with enough time to get a full night’s sleep.
They didn’t. They went to sleep shortly after dark, woke up around midnight to fuck and eat, then went back to sleep until dawn. For hundreds of thousands of years.
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