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Comment by kungtotte | Hacker News Reader

Shipboard life was one of the first large scale applications of precise timekeeping. You need it for navigation and for organising shifts and jobs (though I think navigation is the major player here).

For most people at that time there was no need for even hourly timekeeping, much less minutes or seconds. You woke up in the morning and ate your breakfast, milking the cows took however long it took, then you gathered the eggs from the hens, probably around that time you had lunch, then depending on the season you'd do whatever was needed in the fields until the sun started setting and then you ate supper.

But with navigation you had to know how far to sail in any given direction to not get knocked off your course.

I'm certain that the use of 60 and 12 base systems came from the Sumerians and Egyptians, but their application for timekeeping is probably influenced heavily by sailors.

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It seems like even without precise knowledge of absolute time, precise knowledge of intervals would be useful; you could evaluate a time-trial to know if you’re improving as a footman/chariot rider; you could evaluate the maximum speed of a horse; you could measure height by dropping things off of the sides; etc.

So I would expect that, even if we didn’t have hours, we probably had second and minutes fairly early on.

Portable timepieces were specifically invented for seafaring, at least a century after it was obvious that they were needed for navigation.

I suspect most of the applications you described could be serviced by an hourglass and scale, which (I think) are much older than precision timekeeping.

You don't need any particular units for that, though. Any periodic oscillator you have at hand would work. (And with an analog clock you don't need to name the subdivisions, just look at the clock). You only need standard units with nice divisions for mass-coordinated scheduling.

How will you develop an equation that maps time-to-fall to height without some consistent unit for time?

Just keep the same periodic oscillator around for all of your experiments? Of course, if someone else wanted to reproduce those experiments, she would be using a different oscillator than you, but the same one for all of her experiments. She's probably dropping things from different heights anyway. The theory doesn't actually depend on units of time. The specific value of a constant like G does depend on that, but by the time engineers need to use that they have probably built real clocks.

Or mass-coordinated record-keeping for something like the Olympics. How do you know whether this year’s best runner beat last year’s best runner?

> Or mass-coordinated record-keeping for something like the Olympics. How do you know whether this year’s best runner beat last year’s best runner?

That sort of timekeeping a modern affectation. In the ancient past, it was sufficient to just be the fastest in whatever was the most recent contest. If you wanted to see if this year's best runner could beat last year's best, then you set up a race between them...

Have them race each other?

Ummm, on a farm you milk the cows and gather eggs and move the herd BEFORE breakfast. Then you tend to the crops for several hours before lunch, if you have lunch.

I am not a farmer, so I apologize if I described it incorrectly. My point still stands though; order of operations matter but not the timing of them.

Can you explain why?

Modern cows are milked twice a day, so it's more convenient morning and evening than e.g. noon and midnight. I don't know if the cows of long ago were like that, because the whole concept of a "dairy" is sort of modern anyway. I'm similarly suspicious of this "navigation" explanation. Timekeeping is important for determining longitude, but ancient mariners didn't know how to do that.

The cows udders are full and they are mooing at you and the longer you leave eggs the more shit that can happen to them.

Not the OP, but farmers tend to get up really early and have long working hours to boot. (I worked on and managed a dairy farm for a few years early in my career, plus have read about farmer life, is how I know.)

As an aside, I remember and like the point in a children's book I read as a kid, where they vacationed on a farm, and saw that the farm workers took their time about their work, did everything at a (somewhat) slow and measured pace, and still got a lot done (and well) by the end of each day. Very applicable to the modern software field, IMO, instead of the noise, flame and fury, often quickly descending to ashes, that we see a lot of nowadays.

>As an aside, I remember and like the point in a children's book I read as a kid, where they vacationed on a farm, and saw that the farm workers took their time about their work, did everything at a (somewhat) slow and measured pace, and still got a lot done (and well) by the end of each day. Very applicable to the modern software field, IMO, instead of the noise, flame and fury, often quickly descending to ashes, that we see a lot of nowadays.

JFYI, in Italian there is a saying is "col passo del contadino" that roughly translates to "at the peasant's pace" to indicate someone who is working at first sight slowly but never stops and at the end of the day has done the same or more work than someone else's that works fast but takes several pauses.

>"col passo del contadino"

Great saying. Will look it up in Google Translate. I know a little Spanish, and Italian is somewhat similar, I guess. But didn't know those words, except can guess / figure out meaning of passo (pace?) and del (of).

Passo is actually more literally "step" in the sense of walking, "fare un passo avanti" means "making a step forward", and you would say "ha un buon passo" to mean "he is walking at a good pace", but you can use it also (like in English) outside strictly walking, coming from the very same Latin etymology (in the case of English via French):

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pace

OT, but still originated in the farms, this is another great saying:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14593794#14594858

Getting it now, thanks for the info and links. I guess then that's where the term compiler passes (strides, per the etymonline link) over source code came from too :)

Yep, and you also walk across a border with a passport and, should your heart have some arythmia, you may have a pacemaker implanted, all from the same common root.

In Italian "passo" is used also for other things, it means also the pitch of a thread (of a screw or bolt) and the wheelbase (of a vehicle).

Just checked it in Google Translate, for English, Spanish and German:

  col passo del contadino (IT)

  with the pace of the farmer (EN)
  con el ritmo del granjero (ES)
  mit dem Tempo des Bauern (DE)

Nice.

I think in English a good equivalent is "slow and steady wins the race".

>I think in English a good equivalent is "slow and steady wins the race".

It is very similar,yes, but that seems more like coming directly from Aesop's the tortoise and the hare, that in Italian would be "Chi va piano va sano e va lontano".

Cows with full udders are like humans with full bladders, only they have no way to relieve themselves. Cows with partially empty udders just stop giving milk if you don't milk them.

If I had to guess, get the most labor intensive part of the day done while the sun is still low in the sky and not as intense. Otherwise, you'd have to wait until around 3 or so before it starts setting.

Hilariously one of the most labor intensive parts of the day, bucking hay, is specifically done during the hottest part of the day. (The hay is too wet in the morning.)

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