Minutes Did Not Exist During The Middle Ages

MessageToEagle.com – Medieval people used a number of instruments to keep track of time. During the Middle Ages, a combination of water clocks, sun dials, and candle clocks could to tell time, but none of those could determine time to the minute.  Minutes were simply not used as a measure of time during the Middle Ages. Both the medieval and modern “day” (sunrise to sunrise) contain 24 hours, but medieval hours varied in length with the month and the time of day.

While the best water clocks told time to the quarter hour, it was not until the wide use and improvement of mechanical clocks that people could tell time to the minute.

On the equinoxes (March 21 and September 21), a medieval daylight hour equaled a nighttime hour — and each contained a modern 60 minutes. But on Christmas in medieval London, a daylight hour contained only 40 minutes, while each nighttime hour contained 80 minutes. Of course, on St. John’s Day (June 24), a medieval daylight hour in London contained 80 minutes, and a nighttime hour contained only 40 minutes.

The reason we measure time in units of sixty is because we still use the system worked out by the Sumerian civilization, which flourished in Mesopotamia about 2,000 B.C.E.

The Sumerians invented the Sexagesimal System based on the number 60. Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour – and the Sumerians also had a calendar with 360 (60×6) days in a year. To make it work for all units of time, the Sumerians also fixed twelve hours (double six) in a day and twelve at night, and roughly 12 months in a year (especially in a 360 day year).

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The Babylonians, who lived after the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, also based their mathematics on the number 60. This was because the number 60 is a superior highly composite number, having factors of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60 (including those that are themselves composite), facilitating calculations with fractions.

The ancient Egyptians were no different and also used time calculation on the number 60. They divided their year into three 120-day seasons of four months of 30 days. They defined the hour as either 1/12 of daytime or 1/12 of nighttime.

However, it took long time before we started using minutes as a time measurement.

Jost Burgieven is credited with inventing the minute hand in 1577. The minute hand was not widely added to clocks until the 1680s. The mechanical clock was developed to a level of reasonable accuracy in the 14th and 15th centuries.

In the 17th century, pendulum clocks were developed, and this enabled measurement of seconds as well as minutes. The Royal Society in the U.K. first proposed the second as a unit of time. The duration of a beat or half period (one swing, not back and forth) of a pendulum one meter in length on the earth’s surface is approximately one second.

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