[Written for the Waste essay contest.]

For many millennia, man has tried to create ways to measure time. These ways have been many and varied, as many and varied as man himself. It is highly relevant for us to study how past ages tried to measure time, because through this we understand our modern concept of time and where it came from.

There were no clocks in the ancient world, which made it hard to make appointments and keep them. Instead, time was natural. It flowed with the seasons and with the sun, as Ecclesiastes said, "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven". Ancient man honored this sacred concept of time with great works that were really calendars, like Stonhenge in Great Britain and the Pyramids of Egypt. These could be used to predict when it would be time to plant, and when harvest would come, as well as astronomical events like eclipses and solstices. There could also have been ritual sacrifices involved, like with the Mayans of Mexico.

Up until the Renaissance, man had no real need to be accurate about time, as opposed to our modern age. This was an age of commerce and exploration. City life increased dramaticly during this period. In the Renaissance, it was believed that man was the measure of all things, so time was measured on a more human scale. Before, the only real clocks were the church bells that would ring for the prayer hours, like the Angelus. When the great Italian scientist and astronomer, Galileo invented the pendulum, however, it became possible to subdivide time in a new way. Since then, the pendulum has been the basis for all accurate systems of measuring time. Even the atomic clock is really a pendulum! It was not until many years later, however, that sailing ships could measure time well enough to tell where they were on the ocean in terms of latitude and longitude.

In the era of the Cold War, which ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, time became atomic. The US and the USSR (Soviet Union) each had giant nuclear missiles facing each other, as well as a Space Race. President Kennedy proclaimed that man would go to the moon, and within a mere decade. All of these systems needed absolute precision, which was measured using atomic nuclei. The Star Wars (Missile Defense Shield) took this idea even further, when it was decided to use missiles to pinpoint other missiles and knock them out of the sky. With this, we see that man was not merely subject to time any more, but now believed he was in control of time itself.

When you look at your wristwatch, you do not see just Time, you see your own particular relationship to Time. Perhaps in the future, when man’s needs have changed, his ways of measuring time will change once again. Until then, we must look to history to understand where our concept of time has come from.