Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos!
Today, some extra bits of information from my video about the future tense — and if
you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card.
As I said in the main video,while King Alfred translated Augustine’s Soliloquies, he never
translated the Confessions, which is a shame as it would have given more insight into how
Old English speakers might have thought about Augustine’s breakdown of time. But Alfred
is involved in this story in another way. He seems to be the first clear recorded instance
of a European using the candle clock, which measures time by burning a candle with time
measurements marked on it. The Chinese were known to use the candle clock in the 6th century,
predating King Alfred, but these were likely two independent inventions. The advantages
of the candle clock are that it doesn’t rely on the sun as in the sundial, which had
been used ever since around 1500 BC by the Egyptians and Babylonians, and it is simpler
and requires less maintenance than the water clock, which uses the slow dripping of water
to measure time. Again, the the Babylonians and Egyptians seem to be the first to use
water clocks as far back as the 16th century BC, but it was also used in the ancient world
in China, India, Persia, Greece, and Rome. The Greeks called the water clock a clepsydra,
literally water thief. So in many ways we have the Babylonians to thank for kicking
off the whole timekeeping endeavour. Another element we have to thank the Babylonians for
is the division of the day into twelve daylight hours, probably to reflect the twelve-part
zodiac, and also because the Babylonians used a sexigesimal counting system, base 60 instead
of our base ten decimal system, hence also 60 minutes and 60 seconds.
But the real obsession with time began in the Christian monasteries of Europe, and it’s
all because of their praying schedule. In order to hold the necessary services at the
appointed times, matins at sunrise, sext at midday, none in mid-afternoon, vespers at
the end of the workday, and compline in the evening, they needed to keep track of time.
But there were some problems — sundials wouldn’t work at night or on cloudy days,
the water in the water clocks would tend to freeze in the northern monasteries in the
colder months, and candles were expensive. Often they just appointed one monk the job
of tracking natural cues like the cock crowing in the morning, but that meant that he had
to stay awake at night, leading to what is now a children’s song, Frère Jacques: Brother
John, wake up, sound the matins, ding dang dong! So the Church were all in favour of
developing better clocks for keeping time. Now let’s pause for a moment to consider
the word clock itself. It’s related to French cloche meaning “bell”, from Latin clocca,
which may have come from a Celtic word. So originally a clock was just that, a bell.
In the monasteries, when it was the appointed time for prayer, someone would ring a bell
to call the monks to the service. Only later when the bell was attached to a mechanical
timekeeping device was the word clock transfered over to the timepiece itself. We don’t know
who first invented the mechanical clock but they started to appear in medieval Europe
in the 14th century. Initially these clocks, often contained in towers, didn’t have clock
faces, they just rang bells on the hour. The dial, when it was added to the clock towers,
was developed from the old sundials, circular and moving in a clockwise direction because
that’s the direction the shadow moves on the sundial, at least in the northern hemisphere.
The word dial, by the way, comes from Latin dialis “daily” from dies “day”. These
early mechanical clock dials had only one hand to indicate hours. They weren’t accurate
enough yet to measure anything smaller. But over time technological improvements were
made to these early gravity driven clocks, like Christian Huygens invention of of the
pendulum driven clock, Robert Hooke’s improvements to spring driven clocks, and Daniel Quare’s
addition of the concentric minute hand. And thus as clocks became more accurate additional
division became possible. Minute is related to minute, from Latin minutus “small”,
and was used in the Latin phrase pars minuta prima “first small part”, or in other
words the first division of the hour into sixty. Second in turn comes from the phrase
pars minuta secunda “second small part”, so the second division into a smaller part,
Latin secundus meaning not only “second” but also “following” from the verb sequi
“to follow”. That only leaves hour to etymologize. It can be traced back to Greek
hora which rather vaguely referred to a period of time or season, ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European
root meaning “year, season”, through the Germanic branch also giving us English year.
Greek hora also gives us the words horology “the science of time”, French horloge
meaning “clock”, and horoscope literally “period of time watcher”, which brings
us back to the notions of prediction and the future.
And what’s more, the metaphor of the clock was, particularly during the Enlightenment,
used to conceptualize one idea about the universe, the clockwork universe, set in motion by God,
the cosmic clockmaker, and following the laws of motion that Isaac Newton discovered. A
deterministic universe that was completely predictable.
As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a
wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast
platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!