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Showing posts with the label time

24 hours and a Second Longer for June 30th, 2015

Have you ever wondered how accurate our time monitoring is? It has been a millennia since the invention of clocks. According to Wiki, the clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the need to consistently measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units: the day, the lunar month, and the year. Devices operating on several physical processes have been used thousands of years ago. A sundial shows the time by displaying the position of a shadow on a flat surface. There are a range of duration timers, a well-known example being the hourglass. Water clocks, along with the sundials, are possibly the oldest time-measuring instruments. A major advance occurred in Europe around 1300 with the invention of the escapement, which allowed construction of the first mechanical clocks, which used oscillating timekeepers like balance wheels. During the 15th century, Spring-driven clocks appeared. Then clockmaking flourished during the 15th and 16th centuries. The next development in