When There Were 23 Hours in a Day & Other Time Tidbits

"Time is free, but it's priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. Once you've lost it you can never get it back." - Harvey MacKay

Some fun facts about time and clocks:

• The word clock comes from the French word cloche, which means "bell." The Latin for bell is glocio and the German is glocke.

• There are 86,400 seconds in a day.Photo by --mike-

• There are about 600,000 seconds in a week. There are more than 2.6 million seconds in a month. There are more than 31 million seconds in a year.

• The first mechanical wind-up alarm clock that could be set for any time was patented by Seth E. Thomas on October 24, 1876. Almost 100 years before then, Levi Hutchins of New Hampshire invented an alarm clock but his would only ring at 4:00 am.

• The clock tower in the movie Back to the Future (1985) is the same one seen in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird.

• One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, the Earth's rotation isn't perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and the moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milliseconds per century. So during the time that dinosaurs roamed, the length of a day was only 23 hours long.

• Galileo made an important contribution to the arena of time when he was 17 years old and was not attentive in church. As he stood in the Cathedral of Pisa and watched the large chandelier swing on the ceiling, he noticed that no matter how short or long the arc of the chandelier was, it took exactly the same amount of time to complete a full swing. This gave him the idea to create a pendulum clock.

• Einstein showed that gravity makes time run more slowly, so when airplane passengers fly where the Earth's pull is weaker, they age a few extra nanoseconds each flight.

• In 1972, a network of atomic clocks in more than 50 countries was made the final authority on time and is so accurate that it takes 31.7 million years to lose about one second.

• To keep this accurate time in sync with the Earth's slowing rotation, a "leap second" must be added every few years (we just added a "leap second" on New Year's Eve 2008).

• If a person lives to be 70 years of age, that equals 25,550 days (which is 1,533,000 hours, or 91,980,000 minutes, or 5,518,800,000 seconds).

• The world's most accurate clock, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, measures vibrations of a single atom of mercury. In a billion years it will not lose one second.

Who knew time could be so interesting, eh? Make the most of yours today!

Photo by laffy4k