A Brief History of TIme

In the early days, it was easy.  God gave us daylight and darkness, but after that, pretty much left us to our own devices.  That became a problem, because men, left to their own devices, will screw it up every time.  Time, yeah, time.  We want to measure it.  So, we broke the day into 24 pieces, called then hours, and the hours into 60 pieces, called them minutes, and expected things to happen.

Things did happen, but then we invented sundials, and later, clocks, and expected everyone to get on the same technology.  Technology, yeah.  But, what time is it?  Everyone in a certain town would agree, when the sun was at it's highest, we called Noon.  But, 20 miles west, the sun got to its highest point some minutes later, and they called that noon.  Across the continent, every little town had its own time standard.  I remember a steam whistle in most towns that would sound at various time, most regularly, at 8:00, noon, and 5:00.  Everyone would regulate their individual clocks based on that whistle, an inefficient manner at best.

But, come the trains, which must run on time, and how will that happen if we can't even decide what time it is?  So, we invent something called Standard Time, which we didn't get to till the 1800s, specifically so that the trains could run on schedule.  Now, we're divided geographically into Standard Time Zones,

Our lives are adjusted to the merciless tick, tick, tick of the clock, but nowadays clocks don't tick. No, today, our time is regulated by the oscillation of cesium, a radioactive  atom, and we call the timepiece, the Atomic Clock.  This clock is run at the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC and sets the standard for time all over the US.

Then, we come to another construct called Daylight Saving Time, which was originally intended to help farmers,  It will affect most of us tomorrow morning at 2:00 a.m.  By most of us, I mean that if you live in Arizona, you're immune from this virus which hasn't infected your state. The rest of us, however, suffer through it twice a year, artificially measuring what God intended should be measured by the rising and setting of the sun.





I, for one, wish that legislatures should stop toying with what God hath wroght, and tell me, once and for all how to set my watch (which I still wear).  This changing time twice a year is silly and wasteful.