telling the time in days of old

[joko]

what did people do before clocks were invented, it was cloudy so the stars weren't visible and sundials were no use at night??

[5029]

they probably just guessed, using the position of the sun

[Jules001]

Most people then would have worked on the land, so they rose with the sun and worked until the sun set. They would have been able to know roughly what time to eat etc, by the position of the sun. However as there was no tv etc, they didn't need to be very precise with time in their day to day lives. Corrie and Eastenders weren't an issue:)

[jake-the-peg]

Even when clocks were invented there was no accurate way of getting them all to tell the same time, but this didn't matter really until the railways came along. Up to then cities like London, Bristol and Manchester ran times that were quite a long way apart.

[Octavius]

As mentioned above, peoples days were governed by the hours of daylight/sunlight, daylight meant work on the land etc, whereas nighttime meant sleep/boozing or a little bit of how's yer father!

There is some thought that the Sumerian�s were the first to put a stick in the ground and call it a sun clock. Certainly the Egyptians were interested in telling time, using Obelisks as early as 3500 BCE to divide up the day into parts. Water clocks (clepsydras) date to around 1500 BCE. Needless to say, the Chinese were building really sophisticated time telling devices far sooner and for far longer than we were in the west.  More info here... http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa071401a.htm

 

[brachiopod]

*snigger* octavius !

How's yer father indeed !!!

[garlicbreath]

I have read that people used to mark lines on candles, as far apart as took an hour to burn (grammar?).

[landie]

It was not that long ago that different parts of the country had their own local time based on sun rise and sun set as the Earth rotated. It was, apparrently, only in the time that the Railways needed a proper timetable that the clocks were synchronised to GMT.

[Ray the DJ]

They probably didn't need to know the time.
Why would they need to know?

[Mortartube]

As Garlicbreath mentioned, candles graduated with lines were burnt (often in churches or Cathedrals), these could be lit at a particular time when you did know roughly what time it was (from celestial observations etc) and kept burning from then on in a sort of production line of timekeeping. Water clocks were also used, they were basically a container filled with water. A small hole was made in the bottom and the container would empty in a measured amount of time. Neither of these devices were paticularly accurate and it was only with the advent of the Industrial revolution that accurate timekeeping became more important.