The sun dial worked during daylight, but how did people agree on what time it was at night before clocks were invented?
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Bro why you trying to divide the day into so many chunks the industrial revolution hasn’t happened yet just go to bed
There were some timekeeping approaches, including candles marked with the hours based on burn rate (also used as alarm clocks by sticking metal things in them that would fall on a bell or metal dish below), but there also wasn’t a lot of reason to know the time accurately at night. Hell, in the time before clocks, there wasn’t much need to know the time accurately in the day. People used sunrise, noon, and sunset as the major markers.
From my larping experience
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Moon position, it’s not as reproducible as the sun, but you can really see the moon moving through the sky.
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Light, especially in summer, it starts to get night around 22, is pitch black at midnight around 3-4 you start to guess some light in the sky, at 5 it’s not day yet but you can see without a torch, and at 6 it’s bright.
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Candle and fire-pit aren’t objective clock, but still a way to evaluate how much time has passed.
It’s funny you say candle, because there were actually fire clocks that were very accurate. They couldn’t tell you what time it was, but they could tell you very accurately how long they had been burning. If lit before nightfall and timed with a sundial, they were capable of rather precisely telling what time it was at night.
Similarly, sand clocks have been a thing for thousands of years. Think hourglass, but with different size holes and made of different materials with larger volumes.
They’re post is almost completely backwards. Early alarm clocks were nails put into the side of predictably burning candles, that would fall out when it burned down to a certain point, which would happen at a predictable time.
Additionally, while you could probably tell the time from the moon, that would require it actually being up that night/time and then understanding a lot of complicated things about it’s motion around us to have any sort of accuracy. I bet only a few astronomers have even been able to do this. Also it would be 100% reproducible because it’s not like the moon makes random movements, it’s perfectly predictable.
Would it be that complicated if people knew the lunar cycle, especially since the lunar cycle is fairly static? Not everyone I’m sure but those that needed a better time would probably understand and pass that knowledge along for the night folk. Of course depends when in technology we’re talking but I’d assume we humans understood those cycles pretty early for our survival, not in depth but they got the idea the lunar cycle didn’t change like the seasons did and adjust as needed. I haven’t read up on it so I’ll be glad to hear more info.
The issue with using the lunar cycle for timekeeping at night is that the moon is not always visible in the sky at night. It is also not at the same spot in the sky every night, so the math on describing the time based on moon position is actually pretty complex, and unreliable for a consistent overnight clock. You might think that tides could be used as well, but it that is even more complex. In fact, some of the first analog computers were created to do the calculus required to solve the question of timing and tides.
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