Watch Pat Metheny live at the Java Jazz festival from 5.30pm on Youtube

Poor timekeeping in the Middle Ages?

Loading...

198 views

Loading...

Sign in or sign up now!

There is no Interactive Transcript.

Uploaded by mithec on Nov 1, 2009

The old concepts of time were substantially different from modern ones. Before the 13th - 14th century the devices for time measurement were a rarity and a luxury. Even the scientists didnt always possess them. The Englishman Valcherius was lamenting the lack of a clock that afflicted the precision of his observations of a lunar eclipse in 1091. The clocks common for mediaeval Europe were sundials, hourglasses, and water clocks, or clepsydrae. However, sundials only were of use when the weather was good, and the clepsydrae remained a scarcity In the end of the 9th century a.d., candles were widely used for timekeeping. The English King Alfred took them along on his journeys and ordered them to be burned one after the other. The same manner of timekeeping was used in the 13th-14th century, in the reign of Charles V, for instance.The monks kept count of time by the amount of holy book pages or psalms they could read in between two observations of the sky For the majority, the main timekeeping medium was the tolling of the church bells. One is to bear in mind that astronomical observations require a chronometer that possesses a second hand, while we learn that even after the discovery and the propagation of mechanical chronometers in Europe, they had been lacking the minute hand till 1550

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

License:

Standard YouTube License

1 likes, 2 dislikes

see all

All Comments (1)

Sign In or Sign Up now to post a comment!

Any idea what the first song of this video is called?

plethora2many 1 year ago

Loading...

0 / 00Unsaved Playlist Return to active list

Your queue is empty. Add videos to your queue using this button:
or sign in to load a different list.

Loading...Saving...