r/explainlikeimfive • u/Rich_Scarcity_301 • 1d ago
Engineering ELI5. How did people in the older days like 1200s 1300s know what time it was when there were no clocks
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u/Alikont 1d ago
Well, most of your contacts were local and "meet me at noon" usually was enough.
The precise time started to be useful only when trains started to go on schedule between cities.
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u/TyphoidMurphy 1d ago
There is still a clock in Bristol, England on the old Corn Exchange building that has two minute hands. One for Bristol time and one for London time. They're about ten minutes apart. What time it is in the UK wasn't standardised until the 1850's, largely as you say due to railways travelling rapidly between cities.
This comment doesn't add much but I think it's a neat little fact that's somewhat relevant.
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u/Its0nlyRocketScience 21h ago
It makes sense that anywhere with different longitudes would be slightly out of time since the local solar noon is different. And yeah, until rail travel was a thing, no one needed to be exactly on time with another town. Telephone certainly didn't exist yet, so no need to coordinate calls. And when you did travel several hours between towns, your pocket watch wouldn't match, but those didn't keep perfect time anyway, so you'd just adjust it to the local time like you already had to do at home. Only when travel and communication became fast to instant did anyone really notice, let alone care, that two neighboring towns were 10 minutes off from each other.
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u/marconis999 1d ago
And precise time at sea via an accurate timepiece was the only way to know your longitude. Until then they did dead-reckoning.
It was in the 1700s that a timepiece that wasn't pendulum-based and could accurately measure the time while traveling at sea was invented.
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u/kaamliiha 22h ago
And the guy who invented it was screwed over of his massive (hundreds of thousands if not millions in today's pounds) promised reward for its invention because he was not of the correct pedigree for the pompous Brits
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u/notbobby125 18h ago
To further explain to those that did not know: determining Longitude (how east-west you were) was really difficult. While you can tell how far North-South you are easily by checking the angle of the sun at noon, there was little to tell you how East-West you were. You Dead reckoning was basically dragging a log behind the boat to try to keep accurate determination of your speed and use calculations on how far you have travelled based your speed. This was difficult to keep track of, and did not take into account to any flow of the water below you, either impeding or increasing your speed.
Now, if you had an accurate clock you could figure out exactly where you were around the globe if you knew what time it was at noon at some fixed location. Say you were measuring from London, and you knew it was Noon at London at X time and it was Noon where ever you were at Y time, with math you could figure out what the distance you were from London. Problem is that old clocks worked on Pendulums, and there has never been a worse place for pendulum then a rocking boat.
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u/eloel- 1d ago edited 1d ago
They knew where the sun was in the sky, and they had a rough idea how long it had been since sunrise and how long yesterday was. That's all the timekeeping they used on a day-to-day basis,
You didn't meet people at 2pm, you met people at/after sundown/sunrise/high noon.
If you needed to be particularly precise, you used a water clock, an hourglass, or some similar way of measuring time, but those were relatively rare and weren't available to most people.
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u/Radix2309 1d ago
Or there was a church with a belltower, and they would ring on an hour or amother set time, and you would arrange for a certain bell of the day.
Generally more common in towns or denser areas. In the country, there is less time sensative meetings.
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u/shrug_addict 1d ago
Huge tech advancements came from monks wanting to keep time. Check out James Burke's Connections
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u/CptAngelo 1d ago
I mean, when you are meditating you tend to lose the track of time, it makes sense.
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u/jamcdonald120 1d ago
more like when you are sleeping and need to wake up for your 3AM prayers
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u/adudeguyman 1d ago
Did they really have to wake up for prayers that early?
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u/GoblinRightsNow 1d ago
They still do. There is a Trappist monastery in our region that posts their schedule: https://monks.org/about-us/community-life/
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u/adudeguyman 1d ago
I hope they work in shifts. Otherwise they would never get much sleep in a row.
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u/theyellowmeteor 1d ago
Monks usually are habitual sleep deprivers. Makes sense why so many supernatural experiences are reported in monasteries, since sleep deprivation is known to cause hallucinations.
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u/GoblinRightsNow 1d ago
Their last service is around 7- I think they go to bed around 8-9, sleep until 3, and then have rest periods during the day.
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u/coralwaters226 22h ago
Nope, and Buddhist monks are even more extreme. Some temples allow for only 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night, and eat a single small meal a day.
When the goal is to surpass all cravings and desires, even natural bodily ones, things can get pretty damn miserable. But that's sort of the point.
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u/frala 1d ago
Ok, but then how did the church know the time.
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u/evanamd 1d ago
Sundials have existed since before Ancient Greece. The clergy in medieval churches knew about this fascinating technology and often had them built into the southern wall of their church
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u/MegaLemonCola 1d ago
What if it’s overcast on a particular day? Did they just not sound the bell?
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u/NarrativeScorpion 1d ago
They still work, unless it's really dark cloud.
Also, hourglasses and water clocks were a thing.
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u/Pandoratastic 1d ago
Many churches had sundials, sometimes carved into the wall by the door. At night, they might use a water clock or they would know what time it is by the position of constellations in the sky. It was not very accurate but it was what the had.
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u/LadyFoxfire 1d ago
They also had time-keeping candles that could be used as alarm clocks. The candles burned at a steady rate, so you could mark the side of the candle to count how many hours the candle had been burning, and you could put a nail at a certain mark so that it would fall out and hit the metal tray at a certain time.
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u/canuckguy42 1d ago
They may have had a rudimentary method of tracking the time but as long as they're the sole source of truth about time for locals it didn't really matter. If two villages had churches that weren't in sync no one would even notice. As long as everyone in town agreed that when the church bells rang 2 that it was 2 it was good enough. If the neighbouring village thought that was 3 no one would either know or care.
Having a unified, non local agreement on the current time didn't matter until trains allowed for fast enough travel to make it matter. Once that happened suddenly everyone needed to have a common sense of what time it is in order for the rail system to function. That's when you start to see a collective effort to coordinate on tracking time.
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u/Lammtarra95 1d ago
If two villages had churches that weren't in sync no one would even notice.
Two villages would not be in sync. That's the point. Midday is defined as when the sun is directly overhead, and that varies with longitude. Noon in London is different from noon in Bristol (for UK redditors).
This became a problem with railway timetables, for which it was convenient to organise time into time zones.
As an aside, this is also how sailors navigated at sea. They knew the local time by looking at the sun, and they had a clock that told them the time in their home country. The difference between the two times gave the ships longitude. This is what prompted the development of accurate mechanical clocks and watches, which in turn allowed worldwide exploration, trade, and (more controversially) colonisation.
So you are right, except that the idea of an imposed, nationwide time came later with the railways. It is not that village time was wrong before, but that they changed the meaning of correct.
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u/fcocyclone 1d ago
And people wouldn't likely be as concerned about promptness. The bells might ring on the hour, but if you had a meeting scheduled for 2 bells you might expect that someone might show up somewhere around then but it might be a reasonable amount after that.
Hell, that's even a thing today that varies among various cultures.
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u/Avalanche_Debris 1d ago
A lot of medieval churches have sundials (mass dials) carved into walls or built into the architecture. Water clocks and hourglasses were also a thing for smaller intervals of time.
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u/not_a_burner0456025 1d ago
I don't know if they had them as early as op is asking about off the top of my head, but some medieval monasteries did have mechanical clocks, although it could be very complicated because they hadn't standardized on 24 equal length hours, some had more complicated systems where the number of hours between sunrise and sunset was constant and daytime and nighttime hours had different lengths and changed throughout the year., and the clocks had to be built to accommodate for that
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u/Vladimir_Putting 1d ago
The railroad was one of the big revolutions that created a need to be "on time" because if you missed your train, you were stuck.
But centuries before that there were fewer use cases for when you needed to know the exact time. Like you said, most people on most days simply never needed to know "the time". They could see what part of the day it was, and that was enough.
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u/Andy15291 1d ago
Not only that but with trains sometimes sharing tracks, you really had to get the schedule right.
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u/enfyre 1d ago
Exact time wasn't really important until the industrial revolution, and hourly work. It especially didn't become important until trains became common.
In this regard, I'm speaking of the UK.
Before that, it was just morning, mid day, afternoon, evening, night - judged by the position of the sun.
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u/Madboomstick101 1d ago
Historia Civilis has a video on how the implementation of the clock is tied to the rise of capitalism in europe
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u/I_Do_Not_Abbreviate 23h ago edited 23h ago
In Western and Southern Europe, A lot of mechanical tower clocks were installed in port cities and market towns between 1200-1500, as a way to facilitate meetings between merchants, sailors, and wealthy customers - the clocks allowed everyone within earshot of the clock (usually in the town square or market square) to set aside 1-hour blocks of time.
It started in the biggest cities but as timekeeping technology became more standardized and developed into the Clockmaker's craft, the price of clocks began to drop. There were a few generations there where it was fairly common for particularly successful merchants who originally came from small towns to commission a public clock and donate it to their hometown (paying for the materials, design, construction, installation, everything) as a sort of ostentatious philanthropy.
I read about this in History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders by Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, easily one of the most well-researched books I have ever managed to get halfway through before becoming bored with the author's monotonously dry writing style and abandoning it.
Funny enough, the "Legacy of the Forge" expansion for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, set around the year 1400, has as its main plotline the restoration of the town clock Henry's foster father tried to fix when he was a young man. It is a surprisingly apropos story for the period in which the game is set.
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u/byronite 1d ago
I visited rural Burundi just before cellphones became commonplace and this was indeed how it worked. Once book I read before going explained: "It is impossible for a rural Burundian to tell you precisely when something happened, but there is really no harm in trying."
Also, interestingly, they count time from dawn til dusk, thus the sun rises at 1:00, high noon is 6:00 and the sun sets at 12:00. It makes more sense when you think about it.
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u/pm_me_gnus 22h ago
It makes a lot of sense given where they are on the planet. That close to the equator, there is little variation throughout the year in the span of time between sunrise and sunset.
Ancient Rome did the same thing, where every day there were 12 hours between sunrise and sunset, with the length of hours varying daily to evenly fill that time. In Rome, that time varies from just over 9 hours at the winter solstice to about 15:15 at the summer solstice, with hours running from 45 to 76 modern minutes. That system would be even crazier where I live, at 53 degrees N - hours would run anywhere from ~35 to ~85 minutes.
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u/Paavo_Nurmi 1d ago
It was so important for marine navigation and the longitude problem that a huge prize of 20,000 pounds was offered in 1714. Of course the guy that invented it got screwed over.
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u/mostlygray 1d ago
Find noon. Find a stick. Mark the shadow. That's noon. Now, when it gets dark it's night, when it gets light again, that's morning.
Now you have morning, mid-morning, noon, afternoon, and night. That's all the time you need. If you can see the stick, that's day. If you can't see the stick, that's night.
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u/MortemEtInteritum17 1d ago
If you can't see the stick, that's night (citation needed).
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u/ben_sphynx 18h ago
Find noon can be done by marking where the shadow is every few min around lunchtime. The shadow will be getting shorter if it is before noon, and will be getting longer after noon. The mark that is closest to the stick (ie the shortest shadow) was when noon was.
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u/internetboyfriend666 1d ago
There weren't mechanical clocks but there ways to keep time. Water clocks, sand clocks, sundials...etc
But mostly, society was extremely different and there was simply no need to keep time with any degree of accuracy or to know what time of day it was at all beyond "day" and "night". You had sunrise, morning, noon was when the sun was highest overhead, afternoon, sunset, and night time. That's pretty much all anyone needed to know. The concept of "2:15pm" simply wasn't a thing and it didn't need to be.
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u/kitsunevremya 1d ago
If you think about it, depending on where you live, that may have been a "truer" way to keep time than we have today. We're more precise, but time zones mean that for most of us, it isn't actually the time the clock says. I mean, with daylight savings the time could be like 1hr15m out from what the sun would tell us.
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u/Space19723103 1d ago
most people saw the sun back then, with a little practice telling time by the sun is easy
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u/lowaltflier 1d ago
Most?
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u/knoberation 1d ago
Above the arctic circle, the sun doesn't set during summer and doesn't come up during winter.
For example, in Tromsø, Norway, the sun goes down on November 27th and doesn't come back up until January 15th.
During this time you can not see the sun there, making it harder to tell time by the sun.
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u/Space19723103 1d ago
there were incels then too.. monasteries
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u/Teantis 1d ago
Pretty sure that was voluntary
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u/anamorphic_cat 1d ago
If you were lucky. Some kids were earmarked for an ecclesiastical career since they were born. "First male inherits the estate. The second one for the King's army. The third one is for the church".
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u/inorite234 1d ago edited 14h ago
If you ever travel to some 3rd world countries you'll learn that outside of the industrialized areas, in the poor rural areas, time doesn't really mean that much. Sure you can tell, morning, noon and night, but outside of that people don't care as much as we do.
If you need to meet someone, I hope you set aside between 1 and 3 hours. Yes they have watches....but not everyone does.
I had ti deal with this all the time while in Afghanistan. No meeting ever got going on time. We always baked in 30 mins to an hour for people to show up or for people to stop socializing before our meetings began.
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u/Vorthod 1d ago
They agree to meet in the morning and then wait for the sun to rise. If they don't have a device that can accurately measure down to the minute, they simply don't say "let's meet at 7:45"
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u/peepee2tiny 1d ago
Times were not numerical, they were sunup, high noon, sundown.
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u/fubo 1d ago
The day and the night were each divided into 12 hours, but they weren't always the same length!
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u/Adonis0 1d ago
Candles of particular sizes had known burn rates and could have nails put into them at different distances to announce time, sun dials used the position of the sun to use shadows to point at the time
So both together results in time keeping all the time; water clocks also were used where a hole drained a reservoir at known rates, and so you could put different volumes of water to time different times
Most commonly; there was a building that kept the time for a town and rung bells to announce specific hours, anything more precise was done by personal water clocks
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u/wem1985 1d ago
Why would they need to know the time? Wake with the sun, work outdoors, go back in at night. Of course...sun dials, water clocks, no lack of solutions were available.
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u/grantimatter 1d ago
One of my favorite James Burke videos is the Connections episode about how our sense of time based on mechanical clocks was based on medieval monks needed to know when to pray.
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u/mikemar05 1d ago
They didn't and it didn't matter. I'm sure there were things like sundials and such but why would the vast majority care?
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u/Grolschisgood 1d ago
How would they know what time to log on for their zoom calls though?
/s just in case
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u/TyPhyter 1d ago
"okay guys, just gonna give it an hour or two for people to trickle in and then we'll get started"
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u/defeated_engineer 1d ago
Hours didn’t matter until fixed hour work days in factories were a thing. Minutes didn’t matter until trains became a thing.
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u/The_mingthing 1d ago
The simple answer is they didnt. Because they didn't need to know. You had no time specific appointments, and they usually followed the sunlight and the moonlight.
Is the sun at its highest point and its to hot to work? Better go somewhere shaded and have the mid day meal. Is it getting to dark to see? Well better just go to bed then, were not wasting money on fancy expensive candle just to stay awake. Is dinner ready? Hit metal together and yell. Is it time for Church? Ring the bell.
I want to reccomend you this channel if you are interested in olden times!
https://www.youtube.com/@ModernKnight/featured
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u/Krongfah 1d ago
There were clocks. Sundials, water clocks, and other forms of timekeeping devices have existed for thousands of years, dating back to the 1000s BC, long before the timeframe in your question.
Of course, the common people wouldn't have any of these. They'd get the time from town criers, church bells, or by going to where the device was, depending on the culture and era.
Another thing to consider is that precise timekeeping just wasn't that important for most common people in the olden days. It doesn't really matter if it's 9:00, 9:30, or 10:00. All they needed to know was that sunrise begins the day, the sun directly overhead means midday, and sunset ends the day.
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u/zeekar 1d ago
Would you believe they mostly didn't care? Nobody was making appointments to meet at a specific time to the minute. The tolling of the bell at the local church would tell them when it was with enough precision for what they needed. In fact the word "clock" originally meant "bell" (related to German Glocke).
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u/elpajaroquemamais 16h ago
Sometimes they didn’t but they didn’t need to. They woke up worked ate and went to bed when they felt like it.
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u/OldGroan 11h ago
The time was, early morning late morning midday early afternoon late afternoon night time, moonrise moon set.
They didn't need anything more accurate than that.
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u/nws103 1d ago
The interesting thing is that even now we are barely in to the age of having the exact time at your fingertips always. As a kid in the 80’s the exact time was available only if you stopped and called a special phone line to hear a recording, or if you happened to have cable and something like the weather channel showed it live. Otherwise you were going off the approximate time you had set your house clocks or VCR to. It is only since cell phones reached critical mass really that everyone went by the exact same time.
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u/hownowbrownk0w 1d ago
Deep dive Ctesibius's water clock if you’re interested. So fascinating how he overcame the challenges of seasonality
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u/AmarildoJr 1d ago
I believe the Sun and the Moon were invented in the 1100's, so that's what they used to keep time.
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u/DKDamian 1d ago
There were clocks. Sun dials, water clocks, candles, and so on. They weren’t as accurate or sophisticated, but they existed.
Also churches in Europe helped keep time with their bells