Minutes Did Not Exist During The Middle Ages

Conny Waters - AncientPages.com - Medieval people used many instruments to keep track of time. During the Middle Ages, a combination of water clocks, sundials, and candle clocks could tell time, but none could determine the time to the minute.

Prague astronomical clock. Steve Collis from Melbourne, Australia - CC BY 2.0

Minutes were simply not used to measure 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, people could tell time to the minute until the wide use and improvement of mechanical clocks.

On the equinoxes (March 21 and September 21), a medieval daylight hour equaled a nighttime hour, each containing 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 had 80 minutes, and a nighttime hour contained only 40 minutes.

Žatec clock. Tower clock of Hop and Beer Temple. image credit: Martin Stross - CC BY-SA 3.0

We measure time in units of sixty 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 (60x6) days in a year. To make it work for all time units, the Sumerians also fixed twelve hours (double six) in a day, midnight, and roughly 12 months in a year (especially in a 360-day year).

The Babylonians, who lived after the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, also based their mathematics on the number 60. It 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, and 60.

The ancient Egyptians were no different and 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 a 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 reasonable accuracy level in the 14th and 15th centuries.

In the 17th century, pendulum clocks were developed, enabling the measurement of seconds and 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.

Written by Conny Waters - AncientPages.com Staff Writer

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