Ancient timing tools

In ancient times, time (big time) was not counted by 1234, but marked by ugly children and animals such as rats, cows, tigers and rabbits, which was easy to remember. The specific division is as follows: from eleven o'clock to one o'clock, twelve o'clock is the punctuality; Ugly (cattle) from one to three, with two points as the punctuality; Yin (tiger) is from three o'clock to five o'clock, with four o'clock as the punctuality; Mao (rabbit) is from five to seven, with six o'clock as the punctuality; Chen (Dragon) is from 7: 00 to 9: 00, with 8: 00 as the punctuality; It's 9 o'clock to 1 1, and 10 is the punctuality; At noon (horse), it is eleven o'clock to one o'clock, with twelve o'clock as the punctuality; When you are not (sheep), it is 1 until 3 o'clock, with 2 o'clock as the punctuality; When applying for (monkey), it is from three o'clock to five o'clock, with four o'clock as the punctuality; You (chicken) are from five to seven, with six o'clock as the punctuality; From 7: 00 to 9: 00, 8: 00 is the punctuality; Shanghai is now 9: 00 to 1 1 point (pig), and 10 is the punctuality.

The ancients said that time and day are different, saying "bell" during the day and "more" or "drum" at night. There is also the saying "the morning bell and the evening drum". In ancient times, there were many bell and drum towers in towns. Ring the bell in the morning (7 o'clock today), so say "what time" during the day; At dusk (today 19), drums are ringing, so the night is also called a few drum days. It is more useful to say time at night, because the night watchman beats the banger while patrolling and tells the time by counting. The whole night is divided into five classes, and the third class is midnight, so it is also called "midnight".

The unit of measurement below hours is "hours". One hour is divided into eight hours, and each hour is equal to fifteen minutes now. There is a saying in the old novel called "three cuts at noon", that is, at three minutes at noon (five minutes before noon), at this time, the yang is flourishing and the yin is instantly dissipated. This heinous crime should be "not even allowed to do ghosts" to show severe punishment.

The word "Zi" is engraved below. As for Zi, it is still used in Cantonese in Guangdong and Guangxi, such as "3: 10 pm", which means "15: 50". According to the analysis of linguists, there are a lot of "ancient Chinese" in Cantonese. The reason is that the Han people in the ancient Central Plains lived in Lingnan, separated from the Central Plains people for a long time, and their languages did not "keep pace with the times" with those who stayed in the Central Plains. The division under the word "zi" is unknown. According to Sui Shu's law, second is the ancient unit of time, and below second is "sudden"; How to convert, the book did not make it clear, only said: "'two' is as thin as a mountain; "Suddenly" is like the best spider silk. "

In ancient times, there were two kinds of timing tools, one was "sundial" and the other was "leakage". The sundial is timed according to the movement of the shadow, which corresponds to the scale on the surface of the sundial. Needless to say, you should have seen the sundial in the Forbidden City and the Observatory in Beijing. Water leakage is timed by dripping water, which is made up of four copper pots filled with water, which are stacked on top of each other. There are holes in the bottom of the first three, and an arrow-shaped buoy is vertically placed on the bottom one. The water level rises with the drop of water, and the pot body has scale timing. The original day and night was divided into 100 minutes, which was changed to 96, 108 and 120 minutes successively because it was not divisible with twelve o'clock, and it was officially set as 96 minutes in Qing Dynasty. In this way, one hour is equal to eight quarters. A moment is divided into three points, and a day and night has twenty-four points, as opposed to twenty-four solar terms. Note that this minute is not the current minute, but a word. Between two moments, two strange symbols are engraved, so it is called "word". The word is divided by lines as thin as wheat awn, which is called "two"; The word "two" consists of "he" and "Shao", where he refers to wheat and Shao refers to tiny awns. You can't row below seconds, you can only say "as thin as spider silk", which is called "suddenly"; For example, the word "suddenly" suddenly refers to a very short time, but it refers to change, which means change in a very short time.

Heavenly stems and earthly branches. Including ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches.

Ten days' work: A, B, C, D, E, E, Self, G, Xin, Man, Ghost.

Twelve earthly branches: Zi, Ugly, Yin, Mao, Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Xu and Hai.

Division of Time and Timer Invention in History

20000 BC: Prehistoric people measured time by carving marks on sticks and bones.

8000 BC: Egyptians made a calendar of 12 months every year, with 30 days in each month.

3000 BC: Sumerians in the two river basins divide a year into 12 months, 30 days per month, 360 cycles per day, and each cycle lasts for 4 minutes.

2000 BC: Babylonians used a calendar of 354 days a year, with 29 days and 30 days rotating every month. At the same time, the Mayans created a calendar with two Indian days, 365 days a year.

BC 1500: Egypt invented the first mobile sundial, which divided a day into 12 cycles. Then I invented a timer called Missing Sculpture.

700 BC: The Babylonians divided the day into 12 equal parts.

BC 100: Mechanical sculpture based on 24 hours a day appeared in Athens. A.D. 200: The concept of week began to be introduced in the West.

AD 400: China developed mechanical sculpture.

AD 1 100: The sundial was developed in Europe.

AD 1350: German watchmaker invents the first mechanical alarm clock.

AD 1500: The mechanical bells of Italian churches ring.

A.D. 15 10: A pocket watch with clockwork appeared in Nuremberg, Germany.

AD 1583: The Gregorian calendar was adopted in Rome, Spain, Portugal, France and parts of the Netherlands.

AD 1656: A Dutch astronomer invented the pendulum clock.

AD 1700: In addition to the hour hand, a minute hand was added to the clock.

AD 1800: the timing accuracy reaches1100 second.

AD 1840: Greenwich Mean Time was established.