When did people start counting time?
916656
It didn't quite happen that way.\n\nPeople used the sun and sun dials for a long time before our current system of time. Then they started tracking night-time times with water-clocks and similar things.\n\nBut there weren't universally recognized time systems, or such things as our current standard hours and minutes.\n\nWhen clocks (as we know them) began to be made, there wasn't a universal, world-wide time setting.\n\nMonks created the first machines to measure time, to "sound" the time for their religious rituals. (They didn't have universal standards, but varied by place and religious order.)\n\nAround 1330 he got our standard hour.\n\nTowns started building clock towers to sound time for the town (people didn't have their own clocks yet), measuring time from noon to noon or maybe sunset to sunset (or maybe it varied) in 24 1-hour increments.\n\nMinutes came much later.\n\nI don't know when we started world-wide synchronization.
316406
Depends on how fast you're counting...\n\nhttp://hub1.worlded.org/docs/maththing/ny1p5.htm\nhttp://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/58739.html
210276
March 14th at 23:35 Universal Standard Time.\n\nI'm including a link to the US Navy site, they seem to have pretty accurate info for such things :-)  Most webpages that try to auto-calculate it get it wrong, apparently the math is rather involved and it falls down to careful measurements.
843015
Biological clock. Read the article linked below about a very interesting experiment in human chronobiology.\n\nWK
478107
It is called the equation of time. It isn't really statistics though.
1064552
LONG ONE:\nSplitting the year up into 365 days was easy - everybody knew what a day was, and everybody knew what a year was, so they just counted up how many days there were in a year. This happened all over the world, many times, independently in different cultures. When one group of invaders came along to politely ask another group if they would mind, say, changing their religion, the agressors would say "You've got a day to think about it before we smash you up". It's unlikely these two nations would speak the same language, so this would take a lot of hand waving and pointing at the sun and moon to get across, but across it would nevertheless be gotten. There was no need to go into deep astronomical calculations, because the concept of a day was universal - even newly introduced mortal enemies who didn't have a word or belief in common, would at least have a measurement in common.\n\nGood story below\n\nBryan crooked his right thumb to touch the base of his right index finger (please follow along and do it, too), and said, in much the same way as a Sumerian might have, 4,000 years ago... "One."\n\nHe then moved up a notch - see that? Each of your fingers has three distinct segments. I never really noticed that! - and, touching now the middle segment of his right index finger with his right thumb, he said... "Two." \n\nI think you may sense where this is leading. By the time your right thumb has counted each of the three segments of his neighboring four fingers, you're up to 12. \n\nLong before people were reading with their lips, one imagines, they were counting with their fingers. \n\nSo a day was divided into 12 segments, called hours; and, too, the night. \n\nWhat a lovely story. It was all the ancient Sumerians' fault! The ancient Babylonians inherited this quaint practice, and presumably added their own 60-fetish to divide the hours into 60 minutes, and the minutes into 60 seconds. The Babylonian fascination with the number 60 is interesting in itself - so interesting, in fact, that it suggests the Babylonians were the ones who split up the day, using geometric series:
967157
As has been noted, "o'clock" is short for "of the clock" meaning "according to the clock".  The fuller form of the expression is found as early as the late 14th century (in Chaucer).\nhttp://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19970102\n\nBut we can perhaps go a bit further, to the origins of the mechanical clock itself and the very word "clock".  "Clock" comes from Latin 'cloca' meaning "BELL".  It was the term applied to the newer devices in use for measuring time in the thirteenth century.   As the word itself suggests, the key feature of these clocks is the bell that chimed the hours  In fact, these clocks, often set out in public in a tower to make it possible to notify everyone, did not necessarily have hands.       The key thing, then, was notifying people of the HOUR of the day (not the minute, and not, at least at first, the quarter or half hour either).  This practice of marking/announcing the hours is echoed by the watchman's call "nine o'clock and all is well."     Thus it is scarcely surprising that this way of expressing the time did not (and still does not, except in certain highly formal uses) state anything BUT the HOUR.\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock#A_new_mechanism\n\nSo you may picture the situation around 1300 -- the bell in the 'clock tower' strikes ONE time announcing that the hour is "one of ['according to'] the clock".
259099
calculations or math actually started way back ,no reference to an exact time but the indians during the 3rd century B.C were well advanced in maths , and so were the greeks,egyptians and chinese.
359703
I have always been interested in this.  I view time like a long chain being wrapped around a pole.  The more it wraps around the faster it gets.
255361
The first known use of numbers dates back to around 30000 BC when tally marks were used by stone age peoples. The earliest known example is from a cave in Southern Africa.This system had no concept of base, which limited its representation of large numbers. The first known system with a base was the Mesopotamian base 60 system (ca. 3400 BC) and the earliest known base 10 system dates to 3100 BC in Egypt.
948307
You can blame the ancient Babylonians who had a base-60 (sexagesimal) system for counting.\n\nThey liked 60 because it is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6... and it can also be divided by ten, fifteen, twenty, and thirty. \n1/2 hr = 30 minutes\n1/3 hour = 20 minutes\n1/4 hour = 15 minutes\n1/5 hour = 12 minutes\n1/6 hour = 10 minutes\n\nIn addition to using base sixty, the Babylonians also made use of six and ten as sub-bases. \n\nTo this day, we bear the legacies of almost every number system our ancestors experimented with. From the duo-decimal systems we have twenty-four hours in a day, twelve inches in a foot, and special words such as dozen (meaning 12) and gross (meaning 12 x 12 = 144). \n\nFrom the Babylonians’ sexagesimal system we have sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a circle, where 360 degrees is derived from the product of the Babylonian's main base (sixty) and their sub-base (six); that is, 60 x 6 = 360.\n\nThe French at one time tried to mandate a base-10 time system, (10 hours in a day, 100 minutes per hour), but it never caught on.  So like much of the weirdness of our 3 ft / yd, 1760 yd. / mile, 8 oz / cup, etc. we have to live with numbers that aren't all based on 10.  I wish it were so, but it isn't.
959255
A technological development that permitted sailors to estimate how far east and west they are is the invention of portable, reliable timepieces.  There is a wonderful non-fiction book about this called "Longitude" by Dave Sobel.\n\nhttp://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientific-Problem/dp/0140258795/\n\nThe concept of time based navigation had been around for quite a while, but it took a long concerted effort to develop the tools necessary. John Harrison developed his first mechanical chronometer over seven years and tested it at sea for the first time in 1738.\n\nAs was said above, North-South navigation has been around since prehistory.
789489
Blame it on the Brits:\n\n"In 1792, the British East India Company established the Madras Observatory in Chennai (then Madras), largely due to the efforts of the British sailor-astronomer Michael Topping. In 1802, John Goldingham, nominated as the first official astronomer of the Company in India, established the longitude of Madras (13°5′24″N, 80°18′30″E) as 5 hours and 30 minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time as the local standard time. This marked the first-ever instance of the use of the current time zone, and departure from the earlier standard of day-beginning at sunrise getting shifted to midnight."\n\nIt is considered Indian Standard Time and the full explanation can be found here:\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Standard_Time\n\nThanks for a good search!!
155171
since the beginning of mankind, people have been hitting round objects with a stick and running.  who could ever pinpoint an exact date when u think about it that way?
1067064
Our dating system was created several hundreds of years after the death of christ. The priest/monk who decided on the system had no way to accurately gauge the time since the birth, so had to estimate.\n\nIts not a descrepency in faith here, just in humanity, someone is born and lets say 345 years 2 day and 21 hours later someone decides to think up a way to keep track of years that wasn't abitrarily based on the life of rulers(4th year of yadayadas reign) leaders who were often named the same thing through the generations casting more doubt onto WHEN.\n\nIts not a matter of importance to the faith to know when it happened, so it wasn't kept. Only the matter that it did happen is of import.
745402
Time is like light it curves, and we are part of a time line that can not be changed if it was to do so we would be living in a parallel universe so yes time dose exist.  Oh by the way here is a little test to prove that time dose exist it just dose not matter.  The next time you see some one look at there watch count to 30 and ask them what time it is, the person will then look at there watch again and give you the time.  The point is only 30 sec has gone by yet they had no idea what time it was this is because people do not care what time it is , they care about what time it is not.  they know that there meeting is at 3pm it's only 1pm  there fore they can care less what time it is.  So with that said time exist, but really dose not matter.
974821
Here ya go....http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/newyear.html