Timing Is Everything
Posted: Sunday, September 04, 2011
by Octavia Hansen
Octavia Hansen
What time is it? Are you running late? Out of time? On time? Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit was always late - kinda funny since he was always looking at his watch. Lewis Carroll, the creator of this character, was a gifted mathematician at Oxford and consequently was obsessed with numbers, accuracy and timing.
Considering how many clocks there are around today (on the telephone, on the television, on the wall, in the car, on a billboard, on a bank, on your wrist), no one should ever be late. But now the world is so busy, timing can be difficult.
Timing began in the sky. Star charts have been drawn on cave walls, artistically tiled into floors, and painted across ceilings since man started noticing the sky. Sometimes only a constellation, the North Star (travelers and navigators use stars the most), or just the marking of the solstice, planting and harvesting. This timing works on a very broad scale.
First, there was the sun. Daily.
There the moon. Monthly.
The stars and planets became seasonal. Yearly.
Constellations and comets became sometimes once in a lifetime.
Charting and timing of all these movements meant they had some prediction of the future. Not much, but at least they knew it was coming. This kind of timing, being very general, served the masses for generations.
Individual timing. Timing became more important as civilization spread, especially when mankind went from free abused slave labor to paid-by-the-hour workers. Let's face it, when you lived on the farm, day and night was all that was really needed. For more accuracy, there were marked candles, an hour glass, a pre-measured incense stick, water clocks and sundials. Hours began to make a difference. Most timing had limitations -– required the sun, continuous water, it was sometimes a fire hazard, couldn’t be read it at night, not portable - this encouraged inventors toward more accuracy and the practical.
Timing on a daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal scale requires a calendar. Each civilization had its own and calendars counted from varied starting points -- the sun is the center of the Persian calendar, Venus was central to ancient Egyptian calendars, the sun and the moon serve the Jewish calendar. Lunar calendars are the oldest. Cro-Magnon evidence dates the first calendar from approximately 32,000 BC. Stonehenge, a pre-historic monument on the Salisbury Plains of England, is a sun calendar, still hosting midsummer sunrise celebrations after four thousand years. In New Mexico, there is a spiral carved in a rock and at high noon on each solstice and equinox, a dagger of sunlight crosses the center -- pretty darn accurate after at least two millennium.
Personal timing means clocks and timers. A clock is defined specifically as a device with a striking mechanism for announcing intervals of time acoustically -- by bell, chimes and other sounds. Beginning clocks were large, noise pollution was minimal so a bell could be heard for miles, announcing the start of the day, lunch, day's end, call to church, emergencies and funerals. Another trivia point . . . Big Ben is NOT the clock, it is the bell inside St. Stephen's Tower.
Technology became portable and accurate. Around the early 18th century clocks grew smaller and became pocket watches, then wrist watches.
Then came time zones. Timing on a world scale took many years, a lot of trading and finally the world was divided into hours. Time zones in the United States were instituted by the railroads in 1883. Some liberties were taken - Texas is in a single time zone so Beaumont is the same time as El Paso, even at a 1000 mile distance. Russia has sixteen time zones. In the Pacific it can be confusing at the International Date Line.
Timing is everything for trade, travel and communication. Timing is the key to billing. Compound interest. Rate of pay. Baking and travel is all in the timing. When making a connection . . . timing is everything.
In recording, with film and sound, in comedy, music, television and radio are timed to the second. Everything has a time stamp . . . date and how long.
And if you even THINK about relationships -- timing is everything: when you first meet, first kiss, getting together, staying together or divorce. When Hollywood stars get divorced, settlements are calculated from the time and date of filing. Jim Carrey’s first wife missed millions of dollars because she filed only days before his signing a multi-million dollar contract with Warner Brothers: a Batman movie, The Mask, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and so many others.
Some quick tips for better personal timing:
Set clocks ahead a few minutes - in the car, on the computer, or on the wall.
Get a timer with a loud ring. Set it OFTEN. When watching television, on the computer or on the phone, you can lose a lot of hours if you aren’t reminded of its passing.
Organize! Timing spent searching is lost forever. For everything you can buy, do or make, you CANNOT make more time. Have a pen and paper always ready. Know where your car keys are. Make lists, have a schedule (you can always change things later).
And finally . . . Why do clocks run clockwise? Because, on a sundial, which was used by civilizations for approximately five thousand years, it's the direction a shadow travels across the face numbers . . . that's "clockwise."
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)You have a marvelous writing talent. You have the ability to pick a topic, turn it over, look at it this way and that, get some odd point of view, observe something entirely new, describe the mundane and then get so many little bits of humor that it is fun to read, and them WHAMY you give us the sundial info. Just great!
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