Measuring Minutes And Sugar: The History Of Counting Time

Episode: Measuring Minutes And Sugar: The History Of Counting Time
this  transcript was transcribed by AI technology and has not been edited for accuracy

[00:00:00] Before we talk about science, I wanna talk to you about my grandmother's cooking , which is an art , my grandmother, Y'all can just call her Mimi. Mimi is a phenomenal classic 1950s cook, her crab meat. Louisiana is absolutely. One of my favorite comfort foods of all time. I mean, it really comes down to that.

[00:00:28] And little Debbie Swiss rolls for me, and some of you may be surprised by this fact, but my closest friends know that the way to my heart is through Crab Meet Louisiana and little Debbie Swiss rolls. Anyway, That's phenomenal. She makes a chicken tetrazzini, which is like no other chicken tetrazzini I've ever had.

[00:00:53] Her P cheese has rendered all other attempts futile. Don't even look at [00:01:00] a grocery store brand, and I know that I'm biased, but her cream puffs and cheesecake are, as my friend Beatrix says, Beyond. Maybe you have a Mimi too, so maybe this is familiar to you. My Mimi is 98 years old and thank God she is still making these delights for her sprawling family.

[00:01:24] I'm grateful for that for so many reasons, but one of them, , one of them, I'll be really honest, is because even though she has attempted to pass along , all of her recipes, to those of us who like to spend a little time in the kitchen, none of her recipes actually measure up to what she does.

[00:01:46] Sometimes it's because she simply leaves out a crucial step, like the time I was making a birthday pie for Jeff and I used her key lime pie recipe and she told me to put four [00:02:00] eggs in the custard, and what she really meant was four egg yolks, but she left out the yolk parts, so poor. Jeff had a very, very, very runny birthday pie.

[00:02:13] But mostly it's because Mimi cooks by the feel, not by the teaspoon. 

[00:02:21] So I have spent the better part of many phone calls and visits with her over the last years trying to get accurate measurements on all of her top hits. 

[00:02:32] So that we mere mortals can 

[00:02:35] recreate her dishes with accuracy. The reason for measurements in recipes, and I believe with time.

[00:02:44] It's not only to understand what's going on, but to communicate with others, to be able to share in knowledge, in connection, and to be able to replicate tasks to make things [00:03:00] sustainable so that it benefits us all. So it makes sense that we do measure time. But my question today, Why do we measure time, the way we measure time?

[00:03:14] Specifically, why are there 24 hours in a day and why do we then divide that up into basically 12 hours of daytime and 12 hours of nighttime? And because so many other ways of measuring show up in multiples of 10. Why do we have this time thing that is on multiples of 12? And what is the significance of the number 12 with time?

[00:03:39] Let's just take a step back really quickly and I'm gonna say what you already know, which is that one full day, one full cycle of a day we measure as 24 hours. Somebody invented that there were 24 hours in a day, and then we take that 24 hours and we divide it [00:04:00] basically into a day that lasts for 12 hours and a night.

[00:04:03] That lasts for 12 hours. Then we have an hour, and that contains 60 minutes, and then each of those 60 minutes contains 60 seconds. But then each second is divided into 1000 milliseconds. No, that's where it gets screwy, right? Because 60 is a multiple of 12. That sort of makes sense, but then those milliseconds, they go back to a base of 10.

[00:04:30] Why? These are the things that drive me crazy. This is what keeps me awake in the middle of the night. I probably need better things to worry about. So here's a little history lesson, What we think. By we, I mean the people who post about the origins of time on the internet. My new best friends, by the way, I've put references in the show notes so you can read up on it too.

[00:04:52] Anyway, there's evidence that the ancient Sumerians. May have been the first people to divide the day [00:05:00] into smaller parts, and they use a duo decimal system. That means it uses a base of 12 and then a sex decimal system. , you try saying that three times, by the way. , I mean, sex and Decimal has a base of 60, which is five times 12. For those of you like me who don't make map in your head, so why a base of 12 and a base of 60? Here's what's interesting. What I want you to do now is to hold out your hand in front of you. Just hold it out so that you're looking at your palm.

[00:05:33] So I'm holding out my left hand. I know this is an audio podcast and you can't see me, so just know that I'm looking at the palm of my left hand and I'm looking at the fingers of my left hand and starting at the tip of my pointer finger. I can count. The sections of my fingers, and this is only the fingers, not the thumb.

[00:05:55] In fact, you can use your thumb as the sort of pointing device [00:06:00] to touch each section of your fingers and you can count with me down the pointer finger. 1, 2, 3. Middle finger, 4, 5, 6. Ring finger, 7, 8, 9, and pinky 10, 11, 12. The magic number. When you hear 12, do you think, do you, do any of you have flashbacks to Sesame Street?

[00:06:24] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

[00:06:31] I love Sesame Street. So anyway, turns out it was just how people counted on their fingers back. These folks knew how to get more mileage outta their fingers, so they counted 12 on each hand, which gave them 24 to work with.

[00:06:50] Mystery number one solved now the 24 hour. The 24 hour day concept comes from the ancient [00:07:00] Egyptians, so they actually divided the day into 10 hours, but then they use shadow clocks, or we might call them sun dials. I think they're the same thing. And they would add one hour at each end of that 10 hour period.

[00:07:13] Those are the twilight periods, one just at sunrise and one at sunset. And later they would divide that whole time between sunrise and sunset. Into 12 equal parts. It makes sense that this 12 hour day division happened in a location that was relatively close to the equator compared to, say, the Arctic Circle, where it really would've made a difference if you were talking about winter with very, very, very short daylight periods.

[00:07:46] And summer when the daylight hours are pretty much 24 hours long. The thing is that the absence of sunlight made it really difficult to tell time at night, Like when you have a sun dial, you can [00:08:00] tell time during the day, but at night it's really hard to do that. So the way they did that was based on, as you might guess, the observation of the stars.

[00:08:10] Back then they didn't have sophisticated technology. But they could identify 36 small constellations, which they call decans, and those would rise on the horizon as the earth rotated. 

[00:08:24] So from dusk until dawn, 18 decans were actually visible in the sky. However, each twilight period had three of the decans assigned, so that left 12 for the period of complete darkness or nighttime. So the rise of each of the 12 decans marked an hour, and that's how we ended up with the 12 hours every.

[00:08:49] The thing is though, that the 12 decans didn't necessarily indicate a fixed length of time, and it wasn't until the 14th century in [00:09:00] Europe when mechanical clocks came into use, that commoners began to use the system that we practiced to this day. So great. 

[00:09:08] So I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit and talk about the year, because each decken rose before sunrise and then marked the beginning of a 10 day period. So a total of 36 decans times 10 equaled 360 days a year. So we'll come back to that in a minute. That's why we had the 12 hours night and the 12 hours day and the 24 hour cycle and the 360 days, except.

[00:09:38] That the year we know now has 365 days, so we have to return to the Egyptians to figure this one out. The ancient Egyptians also created the calendar based on the moon, and like many people throughout the world, they regulated their lunar calendar by the seasonal appearance of the star serious. What we now know is that that [00:10:00] timing aligned pretty closely to the true solar year.

[00:10:04] Only it was about 12 minutes shorter, but the lunar and the solar years didn't quite match up. So to solve this problem, the Egyptians divided a year into 12 months of 30 days each, and to complete the year, five extra days were added so that the 12 months were equal to 360 days plus five extra days.

[00:10:32] Clear as mud. Right now we have the year measured out and the 24 hour day, but what about the hour? So the Greek astronomers who helped us make life simpler by equally dividing 24 hours, followed the Babylonians Base 60 system for astrological calculations. So for convenience, they divide an hour into 60 minutes, and then each minute into 60.

[00:10:58] We don't really know why the Babylonians [00:11:00] use the base 60 system, but it is a multiple of 12, right? And it's also the smallest number to visible by the first six counting numbers. And maybe that meant something to the Babylonians. I don't know. Math, it always comes back to math.

[00:11:17] Now, what about those milliseconds? Well, the truth is, Nobody really cared about milliseconds. They were not important until 1901. And by then, scientists and mathematicians had developed instruments to measure smaller units of time, and they were pretty much married to a Base 10 system in general.

[00:11:39] So they decided to stick with a Base 10 system for getting really into the granular in the time. So why is this all important? Why have I just taken you on this whole history lesson of time? Here's why we put so much stock into measuring time that we can all relate to [00:12:00] it. Makes sense. That's how we connect with each other.

[00:12:02] It's how we can show up at the same place at the same time when we're traveling all over the world. It's how, I mean, the advantage of having time be a measurable construct is that we can connect, but the disadvantage is that on a human level, On an earthly level, on a natural level, it doesn't take into consideration the ebb and flow of time.

[00:12:29] Like so many forms of technological advances, when we start to measure time, we gain and we lose. We can schedule a zoom call with someone four o'clock in the afternoon, but maybe we lose the natural evolution of a day. Because maybe four o'clock is actually a better time for us to sit with our children and make dinner.

[00:12:55] So this week, what if we take a little bit of our brain space [00:13:00] to appreciate both measured time and unmeasured time to not take time as a construct for grant. But also to recognize that it doesn't have to rule us. And I'm gonna ask you specifically what are ways that you can reconnect with the natural world in your day?

[00:13:22] Because we know the convenience of measuring time, but what happens if we allow ourselves the space and the wherewithal to reconnect with the natural ebb and flow of. What does that give us? I can also tell you this, After years of making Mimis recipes, I know a lot of measurements and I can make cheese biscuits that are pretty close to being on par with hers.

[00:13:55] Pretty close, but not quite [00:14:00] because quality. Goes far beyond the measurements.

[00:14:05] Hey, if you got something out of this episode, let me know, shoot me an email, share it with a friend posted on social media. Or leave me a review on apple podcasts or wherever you like to leave reviews. Anyway, let me know. 

[00:14:19] And I'll send you Mimi's incredible. Crab Meat, Louisianne recipe with most of the right measurements. Stay curious. y'all.