[time-nuts] Pre-industrial timekeeping accuracy RE: Lifetime of glass containers
Joseph M Gwinn
gwinn at raytheon.com
Mon Jun 15 23:01:58 UTC 2009
time-nuts-bounces at febo.com wrote on 06/15/2009 05:49:35 PM:
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: time-nuts-bounces at febo.com
> > [mailto:time-nuts-bounces at febo.com] On Behalf Of J. Forster
> > Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009 2:34 PM
> > To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
> > Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Lifetime of glass containers
> >
> > Interestingly, I recently had dinner with an archeology
> > professor, interested in the Etruscan period. She had just
> > discovered a flatish piece of glass i9n a dig, thousands of
> > years old, and believes it was made essentially like rolling
> > out dough on a slab while red hot.
> >
> > -John
> >
>
> Returning to a more time-nuts-y topic..
>
> What sort of time measurement accuracy would folks 2000 years
> ago have had?
>
> For instance, were they aware of the (relative) constancy of
> the swings of a pendulum of constant length?
>
> I remember stories from school about Galileo using his pulse as
> a clock. They're probably apocryphal, and I would think that he
> would have easy access to other things that tick once a second
> or there abouts (dripping water, etc, if not swings of a pendulum).
>
> I'm also familiar with the famous Shakespearean anachronism of
> the striking clock in "Julius Caesar", and the usual commentary
> says the Romans had only sundials and clepsydra. So how good
> is a clepsydra? What if we go back a 1000 years?
Allan collected this in HP AN-1289:
<http://www.allanstime.com/Publications/DWA/Science_Timekeeping/>
Joe Gwinn
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