This method has a lot of limitation however since in the first quarter, the moon disappears after 9-10 PM, not even mentioning cloudy nights, and the fact that you have to wake up and step outside and look. If they know the date in the lunar month, they can tell the time by just looking where the moon is in the sky. The roosters (everywhere in the world starting from a very old period in history of evolution I would guess) always crow at about the same time every night: midnight, then 3:00 AM, then 5-6 AM. In places where there is no village time keeper, people use roosters to know when to wake up for work. This practice continued until after WWII in some places. It could be a water drip clock, or burning incense, or a western time piece, or just plain old guessing. How they know what time it is varies from place to place and from period to period in history. Every two hours or so a guard at the village hall beats a drum loudly to announce the time and the shift change. A night is divided into 5 periods (called “canh” which literally means guard shift in Vietnamese). In some East Asian countries like Vietnam or China in ancient time, local government is responsible for night time keeping. Then, those same watch-bearing travelers would hop onto another train to a different city, updating clocks across the country, one station at a time. These timekeepers would arrive in a given town, hop off the train, and go show their watch to the station masters. The railroad companies needed to keep precise track of London time, so they would send out people from London on trains with precisely tuned watches so that regional clocks like this one could be kept up to date. The third hand, painted black so it stands out, is set to London time, and it’s a holdover from a period when the world was transitioning from more local times to broader standardized timekeeping. Strangely, it has not two hands but three. It’s this old, ornate clock that hangs on the facade of the Bristol Corn Exchange building in England. Bristol Corn Exchange Clock, image by Stephen McKay (CC BY-SA 2.0)īut there’s one neat artifact in particular from that period which really brings the point home - and this one didn’t make it into the book. Suddenly, high-speed transit collapsed both time and space, making it easier to go faster and farther while also forcing the world into fewer and fewer time zones. In The 99% Invisible City, authors Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt wrote about the standardization of time in the modern era, which was driven by the expansion of railways.
This series of time-centric stories challenges what you know (or think you know) about the way time works around the world. A lot of what we think about time is relatively recent, and some of what we take for granted isn’t quite as universal as one might think. For the most part, we take time for granted maybe we don’t have enough of it, but we at least know how it works - well, most of the time.