Hey, Kira, what are you up to?
I'm just trying to keep track of time by dropping a grain of sand into this bucket every second.
That sounds like a lot of work.
It is pretty boring, but at least I know that I'm 315,576,000 grains of sand old.
Happy 315,576,000th birthday.
Uh, Kira, there might be a better way.
For counting time?
I don't think so.
This is the latest in technology.
That used to be true, but now... Now?
There's only one device that will have you rockin' and rollin' and tellin' the time.
What's that?
A clock.
A clock?
That sounds great.
It is great, and there's no sand required.
Telling time is not a crime.
Now the clocks are here.
Telling time is cool and fun When you have a clock near Alright.
Not a second will go by without you seeing it.
I'll know when it's a quarter past two?
You'll know when it's a quarter past two, half past three, 22 minutes past five or just straight up noon.
Wow.
Clocks sound tubular.
Imagine getting somewhere on time.
You get it.
Clocks.
Wanna show up, not be late.
A clock will make sure you get to your date.
Clocks are cool.
Clocks are fun.
Clocks are numbers from 12 to 1.
Yeah!
Um, how am I gonna get all of this sand out of my room?
I'll go find a shovel.
I'm Joy Dolo, and this is Forever Ago, the show where we start at the beginning.
Today is all about clocks, and here to help me out is Kira.
Hey, Kira.
Hey.
Kira, I have to be completely honest with you.
I don't really give a second thought to clocks.
Me neither.
You know, it seems like it's just something that's everywhere all the time, you know?
When was the last time you saw a clock today?
In my classroom, I was looking at the time for when my mom would come pick me up.
So would you say that you are normally a punctual person?
Are you on time?
Sometimes I am late.
I usually want to be on time, but that never happens.
Girl, you are singing my song.
I am usually two to five minutes late.
And I have a watch and I have a clock and I have it on my phone, but I just, you know, I look at the time and time goes by faster than I think it happens.
Does that make sense?
I know, yeah.
Yeah, like my perception of time is just different.
So we all know where time begins, right?
It's the beginning of time.
But when did we start measuring it, tracking all the years, days, minutes, and seconds?
Today, our phones keep time with precision.
We wear watches on our wrists.
There are clocks on buildings, in classrooms, in cars.
Clocks are everywhere.
But where did they come from?
We asked one of our reporter friends to help us answer that question.
Timekeeper extraordinaire, Carla Javier.
Hey, guys.
Hey.
Kira, Joy, you wouldn't happen to know what time it is, would you?
Um, time to learn about clocks?
Yeah, but what time is it?
3.03?
How'd you know that?
I looked at the clock up there.
And what if you didn't have a clock up there?
I would probably look at my mom's phone.
And if you didn't have that?
I don't know.
Well, one way to figure out what time it is is to go outside and see where the sun is in the sky.
And I looked a little earlier.
It looks like the sun is right overhead, so we're just in time for one of my favorite shows.
Want to check it out?
Sure.
The History of Timekeeping.
In two and a half minutes...
That doesn't seem like a lot of time.
It is a lot of time, for a quick summary.
Huh.
What did people do before clocks?
How did they measure time?
Well, they had to use what they had available, all supplied by Mother Nature.
Our story starts in ancient Egypt.
There, people had a couple types of clocks.
One of them was a sundial.
It told time by using the movement of the sun.
Sundials were tall structures.
Picture a round plate with numbers around the edge.
Kind of like a clock, but laying flat.
Instead of an hour or a minute hand, there's a piece of stone or metal sticking from the middle of the plate.
This cast a shadow on the plate.
As the day passed, people knew what time it was by looking at where the shadow fell.
But sundials have limitations.
First, they were hard to carry around with you.
Hey, are you going to Abar's game night later?
Yes, I'm going to dominate Trivial Pursuit tonight.
Want to walk over together?
Sure, what time?
I don't know, what time is it now?
Let's go check the sundial.
But it's like so far away.
And when the sun went down...
Hey, what's the deal?
I thought we were meeting tonight.
I have been studying royal family trivia all day.
I stared at the sundial for a really long time, but I couldn't find the shadow.
I think it's broken.
Um, maybe we should talk a little about how shadows work.
No light, no shadow.
Ancient Egyptians had another way of keeping time.
The water clock.
It was basically a bowl with a little hole in it that you'd pour water in.
As the water slowly dripped out, markings on the inside of the bowl showed how much time had passed.
It wouldn't tell you what time of day it was, but rather how long something took.
In China, they had invented similar clocks.
One used the burning of incense to track time.
And in the 1300s, people started using sand in hourglasses.
You turn the hourglass over and the sand starts to trickle through to the other side.
When the sand finished falling, you would know a certain amount of time had passed.
People would use them to time things like a sermon or a class or how long something had been in the oven.
Mmm, fresh lovin' loaves.
And time's up.
That concludes this episode of the Abbreviated History of Clocks.
Tune in next week to hear about the magic of gears.
What a cliffhanger.
Now I'm supposed to wait until next week to hear about gears?
You don't have to wait.
I'm here.
Okay, so when we think about time passing, what is the sound that you think of?
I usually don't think of a sound for time.
It's mostly just silent or maybe a ticking of a clock.
Yeah, I'm there with the ticking of like a tick-tock, tick-tocker, like Jeopardy.
I don't know about the Jeopardy sound, but that ticking sound is thanks to gears.
Those are metal wheels that move together while using interlocking teeth.
Like if you hold both of your hands together and you stick one of your hands' fingers between the other ones.
Anyways, the first clock with gears showed up in the 11th century, so about a thousand years ago.
A guy named Ibn al-Halaf al-Maradi made it.
It was still a water clock, but a sophisticated one with this very complicated set of gears.
Basically, the movement of the water moved the gears.
And in the 1300s, completely mechanical clocks hit the scene.
No water required.
Over the next couple hundred years, the technology got better and clocks got smaller.
By the 1600s, people had pocket watches and wrist watches they could take with them everywhere.
But some things hadn't improved.
Because these clocks had to be wound up by hand.
If you forgot to wind them up every day, you were out of luck.
And even if you did do that, the parts inside these watches would slow down over time.
Interesting.
Kira, have you seen one of those clocks like a pocket watch that has a little knob on the front that you twist and it winds up?
No, I've never seen one of those.
Wasn't it in Alice in Wonderland?
I think The Rabbit.
Have you seen that movie?
Oh, yeah.
But after that, a major breakthrough for precision.
The Pendulum.
Do you know what a pendulum is, Kira?
Is it one of those big clocks that you have in your house?
Kind of.
It's a part of one of those big clocks.
It's kind of like a thing that swings back and forth.
Have you ever played tetherball on a playground?
I like to think about it like that.
It swings back and forth and pendulums would change the way clocks were made forever.
It all started with this Italian guy named Galileo Galilei.
Galileo would go on to become a famous astronomer, but when he was just 17, he was a student at the University of Pisa.
Legend has it that he was in church one day when he kind of drifted off.
Maybe I'll grab some takeout on the way home.
Giovanni has that incredible gnocchi.
Oh, but the trout is so good, too.
Is it overkill to get both?
And then something caught his eye.
Huh.
The breeze had drifted in and set the chandelier above him swinging.
And as he watched it, he had a revelation.
It looks like the chandelier takes the same amount of time to swing back and forth, no matter how hard the wind is blowing, whether it's a big gust or a little one.
Galileo ran home to test his theory.
And he was right.
Aha!
He had discovered that a pendulum took the same amount of time to move from side to side, no matter how wide its swing was.
All that matters is how long the pendulum is.
For example, if you take two pieces of string that are exactly the same length and tie marbles to their ends, they'll swing back and forth in sync, even if you push one really hard.
Off you go!
And the other one, just a little bit.
Like the flap of a butterfly's wings.
Here's a...
Tiny little boost.
That's because if a pendulum swings wide, it travels farther up on each side and gets pulled back by gravity, making it move fast.
If it's making a narrow swing, it's not going as high and isn't getting as much pull, making it slower.
This idea was going to be a big deal for clockmakers.
Almost 100 years later, one named Christian Huygens made the first pendulum clock.
The swing of the pendulum took exactly the same amount of time every time, even between different pendulums in different places.
And this allowed Huygens to make the most precise clock the world had ever seen.
Before Huygens came along, no one bothered putting minute hands on clocks.
But that changed soon.
Once pendulum clocks became the norm, clockmakers could promise accuracy within 15 seconds.
There were a bunch of other ideas over the centuries, like using springs instead of pendulums and small portable clocks like pocket watches.
But soon clocks would run into a problem that no amount of engineering ingenuity could solve.
Okay, Carla, big problems on the horizon.
But before we hear about them, I think it's high time for a break.
All right, Kira, we're going to play a game of First Things First.
Awesome.
First things first is where we hear a list of three things and try to put them in chronological order.
Like, did ice cream come before gelato?
And where does sherbet fall on the timeline?
Yeah, where does it fall?
In my mouth is where it goes.
Today's three things are stopwatches, cuckoo clocks, and daylight saving time.
The order is sealed away inside a top secret envelope.
I don't know the answer either, so let's try to figure this out.
Cuckoo clocks.
Yeah.
Those just sound old, right?
But who would invent that, just a bird coming out?
Is it like Disney movies or like cartoons, those old cartoons where they have the cuckoo clocks and they're usually.
You pop them out and then, like Mickey Mouse, dances on them?
Yeah, I've never actually seen a real cuckoo clock.
I've only seen like animated ones.
Me too.
We'll assume that it's at least from the 50s, I want to say.
Yeah.
And then Daylight Saving Time, I feel like that's just been around forever, but I know it's not.
Okay, I think it's cuckoo clocks, then daylight saving time, and then stopwatches.
I think I'm going to say cuckoo clock, stopwatch, daylight saving.
Okay.
Because I feel like maybe there was a maybe not like traditional stopwatches, but there might have been an old school stopwatch.
I don't know.
We'll have the answer a little later in the show.
Time is ticking.
Forever ago.
We'll be right back.
Did you know that alarm clocks used to just be people?
Up and at them.
In the early 1900s, clocks were commonplace, but alarm clocks had not yet been perfected.
So in Britain and Ireland early risers turned to their friendly neighborhood knocker-upper who would come wrap on your bedroom window to wake you up in the morning.
Rise and shine.
For a small fee.
Thank you kindly.
If you didn't live on the first floor, they'd use a long stick to reach up and tap on your window.
The early bird gets the worm.
You're burning daylight.
Breakfast is the most.
Eventually, alarm clocks replaced knocker-uppers and thankfully gave us the ability to hit snooze.
This is Forever Ago, the show where we start at the beginning.
Before we get back to the tick-tock of clocks, it's time to hear the answers to First Things First.
Today's chronological conundrum comes in the form of timekeepers.
We have stopwatches, cuckoo clocks, and daylight saving time.
And Kira, remind us of what you went with.
I went with cuckoo clocks first, then daylight saving time, and then stopwatches.
I went with cuckoo clocks, stopwatches, and daylight saving time.
Okay, Joy.
Here's the top secret envelope with today's answers.
Here we go.
Opening up.
This is going to be intense.
Let's see.
Oh, wow.
Look at this.
So first up was cuckoo clock.
They're at least 389 years old.
Oh, yeah.
We both got it right.
Yeah, we did.
Woo-hoo.
So, yeah, 1629.
That's the first record of them existing.
That's a while ago.
Wow.
And the second one was the stopwatch.
The first device like this was actually made for doctors to use, so they could measure a patient's pulse.
Oh.
And then last but not least, daylight saving time in 1916.
Germany was the first country to do daylight saving time, and they did it to save electricity.
Uh-huh.
All right.
Let's get back into today's time zone with reporter Carla Javier.
Hello again.
So before the break, you were telling us about a big problem.
Oh, yeah.
One that engineers couldn't solve.
Right.
This was more of a human relations problem.
Let me get you up to speed.
In the 1800s, the world was changing fast.
It was the Industrial Revolution, which meant factories started making things like clocks faster and in greater numbers.
And the United States got way bigger when the government bought a piece of land in something called the Louisiana Purchase.
Railroads crisscrossed the country, and the world started getting bigger and more confusing.
Is that our train?
I think so.
Hop on.
Here's the thing, though.
Up until this point, people had clocks and stuff, but they didn't travel too far away from home.
So as long as their clock lined up with the one at church and lined up with the one at school and anywhere else they needed to go, things were okay.
But think about it.
Where is the sun when it's 12 p.m. in the middle of the day?
Um, I don't know.
I never really looked at the sun.
Probably like high noon is like the sun's right up in the air right above us, right?
Yeah, exactly.
But the sun isn't overhead everywhere at the exact same time, right?
Right.
Yeah.
So when it's up overhead in California, it's already moving down towards the horizon on the other side of the country, in New York.
It really just depends on where you are.
And to make things even more confusing, the railroads themselves operated on their own times, too.
Hi.
Do you mind if I sit with you guys?
Sure.
I was just about to get into train travel and standard time.
Oh, standard time.
That's one of my favorite subjects.
My name's Carlene Stevens, and I study time.
Oh my gosh.
Where do you do that?
Well, I'm a curator at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian and I take care of the clocks and watches there.
So maybe you could explain why railroads made people realize there was a problem.
Communities could differ from each other by odd minutes and seconds.
There was Washington D.C. time.
There was Philadelphia time.
There was Boston time.
And there was Charleston time, for example, just on the East Coast.
And that became very confusing for anybody who wanted to ride a train.
It was necessary to know not only what time it was, but what time the line was using.
It was very confusing.
This is the 12 p.m. train.
Wait, my clock says it's 12.02 p.m., and my clock says it's 12.07.
Mine says 11.15 a.m.
Wait!
So what did they do about it?
It became so much of a problem.
There was this big meeting in Chicago organized by the railroad companies, the 1883 General Time Convention.
We hereby propose a standard time to unite trains across the country.
The general public is going to love this.
They'll throw a parade in our honor.
Which is not exactly what happened.
I mean, a lot of people thought it was a good idea and some people didn't seem to care too much one way or the other.
But some people were not happy about it.
Wait, you want me to do what with my watch?
I can't just turn back time like that.
Kira, can you imagine if someone told you the time you had on your clock was wrong?
Well, that does happen once a year.
Once a year?
Daylight savings.
Oh, that is a really confusing time, isn't it?
Yeah, it is confusing because then suddenly all your clocks are wrong.
And when daylight savings ends, you got to change it again.
But I mean, I just change it and just...
Well, there were some people back in the day who were really against changing their clocks.
Maybe we can ask Carleen, why were some people so against changing their clocks?
Some people thought the railroads were too powerful.
The railroads were in control of so many aspects of economic life and daily life in terms of taking up space in cities, polluting the air with all kinds of railroad garbage, taking land and wielding so much money.
So it might be hard for us to imagine getting so upset over resetting our clocks today.
But for people back then it felt like just one more big, scary change to the world on top of so many big changes already.
Some mayors and newspapers came out against standard time.
They thought it seemed like a dangerous suggestion.
Tampering with time.
But on November 18, 1883, many of the railroad stations around the country made the switch.
And the earth didn't shake.
The heavens didn't part.
It was just, okay, now we're on zone time.
So, depending on where you lived, you'd set your clock ahead or behind that time by increments of exactly one hour.
Oh, like time zones.
Yeah, exactly.
Two cities might be in different time zones, like how New York is always three hours ahead of Los Angeles, but now they were lined up to the minute.
So if it was 3.15 in New York... Uh, so then it'd be 12.15 in Los Angeles.
That's right.
A year after the railroads in North America adopted zone time, there was a meeting in Washington DC to standardize time in 24 zones around the world.
Suddenly, more and more people were able to be in sync, and eventually the world got on board.
And this kind of coordinating around the world made it easier for certain groups of people to work together.
Like scientists, artists, business people.
Once everyone was on the same standard time, it was easier to work together.
You could schedule meetings and deadlines, plan events and know, for the first time in human history, that everyone was on the same clock.
And I think that helped make the world feel like a smaller place, united by a common language of time.
I think this is your stop.
Oops, I lost track of time.
Come on, guys, let's go.
Thanks, Carlene.
You're very welcome.
Bye-bye.
What time is it, by the way?
Oh, it's already 3.30.
Wow, it's getting late, and there's so much to talk about, but so little time.
But the point is, people still needed more precise clocks to work together, even after gears and pendulums.
Like satellites, the ones that communicate with our phones.
They need to be super precise.
They can't be off by even a millisecond.
So we keep making better and better clocks, and that's something scientists are still working on.
Even though we live in different countries and we may speak different languages, it's cool that we live in a world where we do have one thing that helps us work together.
Time.
I guess that means I'm out of time.
Bye.
Thanks for all that history, Carla.
Yeah, thanks.
Anytime.
Belly chuckle.
We've come a long ways since people used sand or water to keep track of time.
But who knows?
Maybe one day people will look back on our digital watches and smartphone clocks and think they're totally archaic.
So, Kira, do you have any ideas for the clock of the future?
Yeah.
Maybe in the future, clocks will be like waking you up with the smell of bacon or something.
That sounds on time and delicious.
But that would probably just make me want to sleep even more and just have dreams about bacon.
Yeah, the food clock, like a clock that could make breakfast.
So it's like it wakes you up, but your food is just sitting there.
We asked our listeners to dream up some fantastic futuristic clocks.
And here's what they had to say.
My clock of the future would probably be like, tell me what will happen in the future.
So you could be like, tomorrow at 9 a.m., what will happen?
And it would literally just say like, you'll eat breakfast, but then your bowl will spill over.
Mine would have like, you can transport to the future and to the past.
Maybe it's like a robot, like Siri, but she's not on your phone.
She's like in your house.
And you can just, like, say something, like, set alarm.
And then, like, when you wake up, it'll just be all around your house.
So it'll make sure that you wake up.
In the future, I think clocks will be able to freeze time and skip ahead or go back to whatever time you want.
Say you're taking a math test and you're like, I just want this to be over already.
I want it to be the part where I already finished this.
And then you could just say then the clock takes you to after you're done.
Like every time you were going to be late to somewhere, you could pause time.
So then you don't have to be late to anywhere.
Like say you're swimming and then you have a class at 6 o'clock and it's 5.59.
You could pause time and go there and then you're not late.
Personally, I'm wondering if alarms are going to be less annoying in the future.
Have you ever heard an alarm like this?
Wow.
No, I have not.
That sounds like an alien abduction or something.
Sounds like aliens are coming to Earth.
Yeah, that's one of the 3628800 chimes that will come out of a project called the 10000-Year Clock or the Clock of the Long Now.
Each chime will only be heard once over the next 10,000 years.
The clock is installed inside of a mountain called...
In the middle of West Texas.
That's Zoe Stevenson.
She's a mechanical engineer.
Part of her job is to build gears for that clock.
And those gears need to last 10,000 years.
Wait, why 10,000 years?
Well, let's do a little thought experiment.
What do you think about when I say the future?
I think of like a hundred years from now, like riding jetpacks to school or something.
Half of the world will be robots, and then the other half will be humans that will be freezed so that they live longer.
Would people be robots or like would dogs be robots?
Maybe dogs will be robots and maybe in the future people will be going to the moon on vacation.
Like it'll be a vacation.
So the idea behind the clock of the long now is to get people thinking beyond the next 10 or 20 or even 50 years and try to understand what the world might look like in 100 or 500 or 10000 years.
Are we being good ancestors?
You know, what will someone think of us?
What will our seven times great grandchild think of us today?
Not, you know, what will somebody think about me tomorrow?
Kira, would you have any advice for the people 10,000 years from now?
Don't turn everyone into robots, please.
That's solid.
I would say my advice to people 10,000 years from now was just be nice to each other.
Just be kind.
Don't start any new wars.
Yeah, yeah.
And also, you know, don't turn people into robots.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
We might take them for granted today, but think of how much our lives revolve around clocks.
From sundials to pendulums.
From local time to time zones.
Clocks help us do everything from meeting up for lunch...
To taking off for space with a successful launch.
Plus, clocks give the world a common way of understanding time, which is pretty rad.
Listeners, we want to hear from you.
Do you have an idea for the coolest alarm clock ever?
Head to foreverago.org to send us a message or just a high five.
Forever Go is brought to you by Brains On and American Public Media.
It's produced by Elisa Dudley, Mark Sanchez, Sandin Totten, and Molly Bloom.
We had engineering help from Corey Schreppel and Parker McDaniels.
Production help comes courtesy of Lauren D. and Christina Lopez.
Our fact checker is Ryan Katz.
We'd also like to thank Tracy Mumford, Eric Ringham, Jeffrey Bisoy, Joanne Griffith, Sam Chu Manda, Lily and Julie Seiple.
What about you, Kira?
Any special thanks you want to give today?
Thank you, Darby, for putting me on this show.
All right, I think it's time for us to say see you later.
Bye!
