A brief history of time units: Minutes
This is part two of a multi-part series on the origins of the time divisions of a day. Part one can be found here.
Minutes
While there was great demand for clocks accurate enough to measure individual minutes, they did not become a reality until 1656! Even the most accurate clocks in 1400 were expected to drift as much as 15 minutes per day. As such, the word minute does not appear in English until the mid-1400s. Instead, people subdivided hours into halves and quarters when they needed to be more precise. This can be seen preserved in phrases like “half past eight” and “quarter of nine”.
Minute comes from classical Latin minūta, meaning “very small”, and arrives at English through both Arabic and French. Specifically, the Latin phrase pars minūta prīma, meaning “first very small part”, was used in geometry to describe subdivisions of degrees. The ancient Sumerians used a sexagesimal (base-60) numeral system. Nearly all the attributes of the minute time unit stem from Sumerian astronomy dividing circles into 360 degrees, and then each degree into 60 subparts. This convention was passed down for 5,000 years through Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Arabic, and French astronomers before arriving in England.
The invention that finally enabled clocks accurate to the minute was the pendulum. Galileo’s studies on the mechanics of pendulums, first published in 1602, would go on to inspire Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens to construct the first pendulum clock in 1656. By 1690, after a lifetime of iterative improvement, clockmakers had refined the design into what are recognizable as grandfather clocks today. Boasting just seconds of drift per day, these clocks were the first to commonly include minute hands.
Another key component of this hundredfold increase in precision was the addition of a control system. Even pendulums are subject to the laws of physical reality, and exhibit tiny variations in speed due to wear, temperature, and dozens of other variables that stubbornly resist exact calculations. The solution clockmakers ended up devising was a balance spring that measured the speed of the oscillation, then sped it up if it was too slow, or slowed it down if it was too fast.
Scan of a printed page from an 1857 American guide to train travel. Most of the page features a table of US cities and their respective local times when it is noon in Washington, DC. The rest of the page describes how to use the table.
An additional wrinkle is that sunrise and sunset times also change based on your longitude (east-west location). In 1700, the solution to this problem was for every town to keep its own clock synchronized to its own solar noon. This solution started creating new problems when unimaginably fast rail travel became common in the mid-1800s. In 1799, it was impossible to send information, let alone people or cargo, any faster than a person on a horse. You might imagine sailing ships going faster than that, but skilled crew sailing with favorable winds might only reach an average speed of 10 km/h (6 mph).
European countries solved this new problem by coordinating on a single standard time per country. For example, the UK began tracking “railway time” in 1840 based on the time observed in Greenwich, London. This solution did not work for the US, which spanned so much longitude that when it was 12:12 in New York (and 12:24 in Boston, and 11:18 in Chicago), it was also 9:02 in Sacramento. The eventual solution of resetting every single city’s time to standard hour-wide time zones was only proposed in 1870 and enacted in 1883, on an occasion called “The Day of Two Noons”.
That's right, it goes in the religion hole
Humans seem to be born with a hole in our brains where a language should go. Babies are programmed to take to language acquisition like a duck to water. I suspect that humans are also born with a hole in our brains where a religion should go. For most of recorded history, a religion, a pantheon, or perhaps earlier, an belief in something like animism, would arrive and take root there to explain the burning questions that humans perennially demand explanations to. What happens after we die? Why do bad things happen to good people? How will the world end?
But in our enlightened century, many people are born and raised without the influence of a religion, a pantheon, or even an animist belief system. I argue this leaves a religion-shaped hole unfilled, a naturally abhorrent vacuum. It drives people to try to fill it with whatever entirely inappropriate belief system is at hand. We all know people who’ve tried in vain to fill the religion hole with science, which is clearly not religion-shaped! Science tries to explain how and what, but not why. Why is there something instead of nothing? Why are we here? Science remains conspicuously silent.
Other people will search for something more religion-shaped to believe in. Maybe birds aren’t real. Or maybe you find your faith in QAnon, or PETA, or AI safety. Movements that are not conspicuously silent about why we were put here, what your reason for living is, and when it will all end. I’ve seen enough lost-but-seeking people find meaning in these new belief systems to bet there’s some strong force that naturally attracts people to them.
A consulting tip I’ve taken to heart is that when you’re trying not to do something, it’s a lot easier to find something else that’s incompatible with it and do that instead. It takes a lot of effort and willpower to continually not do something. It’s much easier to start doing the incompatible thing once and expend that effort on continuing to do it. For example, if you’re trying not to smoke this afternoon, it’s a lot easier to chew gum all afternoon than it is to not smoke all afternoon.
So a few years ago I searched my beliefs and constructed something religion-shaped from them. And I intentionally tried to fill my religion hole with my construct. And it worked! It worked better than I could have imagined. I was born and raised without the influence of a religion. I’ve never had faith in anything before. But I have faith now, in things I know I believe in, and it’s an incredible source of strength to be able to just believe in them, without the burden of proof. I feel like I now have a solid foundation that will never give way, and it grants me such a feeling of stability that I never knew I was missing and always wanted.
I offer my home-cooked faith as an illustrative example. This creed definitely won’t resonate for you in the same way it does for me. I don’t know that there’s a way to shortcut the introspection and experimentation it took me to get there. Still, you can hopefully see how arbitrarily choosing to define core axioms like these as true could robustly support a belief system.
“People are amazing. Every person has inherent worth and deserves a chance to be happy. When people put their minds to it, they can do anything.”
I think I will cause discord on purpose
I have a secret technique that will cause any group of engaged smart people to start squabbling. I haven’t seen it fail to work yet, with the caveat that I’ve gotten bored with seeing the same patterns of squabbling recur, so I haven’t deployed it much recently.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: is a hot dog a sandwich?
No wait, come back. It’s a meme question because it works. Well. It doesn’t really work any more because now everyone knows everyone knows it’s a meme question. But asking questions of that nature does work. Consider a fictional example:
- Mallory: Does a tuna salad count as a salad?
- Alice: Hmm. I don’t think so, since the tuna’s cooked and salads only contain raw things.
- Mallory: Interesting. So is a beet salad a salad?
- Alice: Only if the beets are raw? That suddenly doesn’t feel right to me.
- Bob: Wait, no. Those are both obviously salads. They have salad in the name.
- Mallory: Huh. Then would you say a fruit salad is a salad?
- Carol: That can’t be a salad! It’s sweet and salads can’t be sweet.
- Alice: What? You’re crazy. That’s definitely a salad.
You can see how it would work. If everyone leans toward accepting, come up with less and less salad-like examples until you uncover an argument. And do the opposite if everyone instead leans toward rejecting. Is a pile of croutons a salad? Is a chicken fajita a salad? Is a salad wrap a salad?
Why does this work so well? I think it has to do with how people tend to deal with the fuzzy boundaries around categories. My current mental model of how most people think about categories is: ask system 1 what feels right, then get system 2 to come up with a post facto justification. This results in inconsistencies and contradictions if you drill down into a specific category with just one person, and results in discord in a group setting.
If you see something like this happening and want to stop it, the most common defense is to categorically reject this kind of categorization question. While this does successfully protect you from my fellow agents of chaos, it does not protect you from FOMO. And, I think we can do better. Categories are useful tools for making sense of the world, and we don’t want to dismiss interrogating their inner workings out of hand.
My current mental model of how to think about categories in a healthy way is informed by semantics, a subfield of linguistics. The theory goes, each category I have easy mental access to is represented by a prototypical element in my brain. So when I think of “sandwich”, I think of a prototypical ham and swiss on sliced white bread with lettuce, tomato, and mustard. When I want to see if something else fits the category of sandwich, I mentally compare it to the prototype and produce a binary yes or no based on its similarity. The individual variation we observe results from how everyone’s internal learned encoding of “similarity” can be very different from each other and still yield the same result for nearly all relevant questions, nearly all of the time.
The way I cut this particular Gordian knot is that I reject your sandwich binary. I instead think of that ham and swiss as 1.0 a sandwich, a BEC bagel as .9 a sandwich, a taco as .6 a sandwich, a salad as .2 a sandwich, and so on. It’s our old friend cosine similarity, modeled in our own organic brains. Then you can set your cutoff for whether something is a sandwich based on what the question is asking about. You can even re-weight each property of sandwichness depending on what the question is. Sometimes you care more about whether the maybe-sandwich is edible and sometimes you care more about whether the maybe-sandwich will come apart if you throw it. I will not be taking further questions at this time.
And now you know the secret. Please don’t actually cause discord on purpose, unless you really want to, or it would be really funny.
Why histories of words?
ID: Colorful diagram of each letter of the alphabet and its ancestors through Latin, Greek, Phoenician, and Proto-Sinaitic.
So, why histories of words? What unusual circumstances conspired to drive me to select this one extremely specific niche as my creative outlet?
Between histories and words, words are more straightforward to explain. I love words. I read myself into myopia by the age of six. I’d read anything and everything, which my parents gladly encouraged, as their (totally fine) spoken English was far better than their written English. I relayed the contents of parenting advice pamphlets to my parents when I was ten. They’d drop me off at the library on weekends. The library is not childcare! But I appreciated the childcare it provided me. Growing up in the 1900s, I stumbled upon Jed Hartman’s delightful language blog, sparking a lifelong love of wordplay. Rare words get stuck in my head the way people get songs stuck in their head, a mental quirk I find annoying just as much as I find it useful.
My interest in histories began less directly. As a child, I read widely enough to absorb the advice that childlike wonder was precious and worth preserving. So I dutifully tried to preserve it. I’m happy to report that I still regularly experience childlike wonder, however diminished, in the form of an ambient impulse of “Huh, why is that there? What is its purpose? Who keeps it working? When did we start doing things like that?” The impulse still evokes surprise and awe at all the stuff we managed to do across hundreds of lifetimes. Decades of this eventually got me asking second-degree questions to sustain the same joy of discovery, then third-degree questions. And I came to appreciate that not only does everything have a story, the components of its story also each have their own stories, and the components of those stories can all somehow eventually be determined to be Plato’s fault.
I credit David Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words as the inspiration for my particular format. Because my burning question is “why this thing”, I favor detailed histories of specific things over general overviews. Crystal’s book showed me that you can use those specific histories to tell a larger, compelling story that lets you take in the overall arc of history through osmosis, even as it focuses on the details. I aspire to someday publish my own general history told through the medium of histories of words, specifically focused on the history of technology.
If my work has a core thesis, it’s that we made it all up. Dollars to donuts, crimes and punishments, weekends and holidays, we made it all up! That’s awe-inspiring and wonderful, and that also means we can change these things if we can get enough people to agree to. I don’t want to be obtusely postmodern here; there’s clearly a base reality underlying it all that we did not make up. But 99% of the stuff we see, interact with, and think about on a daily basis is human-made, artificial, and of our own laborious construction. And that means we can change them, and make more things like them.
neapolitan
The ice cream flavor neapolitan first begins appearing in 1868. Today, neapolitan ice cream almost universally implies vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, but the three composing flavors were initially not standardized and would vary. One common trinity was pistachio, vanilla, and cherry, which resembled the newly-established (1861) Italian flag. And so the flavor came to be named after Naples, despite its actual origin in Prussia. Admittedly, quality ice cream did also have strong associations with Italy and its gelaterian legacy at the time.
As noted, neapolitan ice cream was actually invented by the royal chef of Prussia, Louis Ferdinand Jungius. In 1839, Louis published a book of experimental recipes he’d prepared for King Frederick William III of Hohenzollern at his Berlin estate. He described a Pückler as vertically layered ice cream flavored with strawberries, raspberries, greengages, cherries, and apricots. It was named after Prussian nobleman Hermann Pückler, a name we can all agree to be glad did not stick. By 1862, his suggested Pückler recipe instead had layers of apricots, quinces, strawberries, and raspberries. By 1903, the standard recipe called for the now familiar vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate flavors. They were still arranged like a layer cake, rather than our familiar horizontal sections. Why those three flavors? At the time, they were the three most popular ice cream flavors in the US, a fact that remains true today.
Why is the adjective form of Naples Neapolitan in the first place? Naples was founded in the 700s BCE as the Greek colony of Παρθενόπη (Parthenope). Two hundred years later, it was renamed Νεάπολις (Neápolis). By around 1000 CE, the systematic sound changes that distinguished Vulgar Latin from modern Italian had altered the city name to its contemporary Napoli. Meanwhile, different systematic sound changes over in France rendered the city name as Napples, then Naples by the 1400s, which is when the city name was first borrowed into English. So the English name of the city is directly borrowed from French, while its English adjective form is based on its Classical Greek name.
Parthenope is a Classical Greek name that’s a straightforward compound of παρθένος (parthénos), meaning “virgin”, and ὄψ (óps), meaning “voice”. In Greek mythology, one of the Sirens bears the name, specifically the daughter of muse of dance Terpsichore and river god Achelous. In 1850, the eleventh asteroid ever discovered, 11 Parthenope, was named after the mythological siren. This fit the pattern of the first ten asteroids, all named for women in Greek and Roman mythology. The first ten women were actually all specifically gods, so perhaps its discoverer, Annibale de Gasparis, chose to honor a demigod instead because he was an astronomer at the University of Naples.
Neápolis is interesting to me precisely because of how uninteresting it is. It’s an even more straightforward compound of νέα (néa), meaning “new”, and πόλις (pólis), meaning “city”. The major city’s name for the past two thousand five hundred years has been the maximally uninspired “New City”. This phenomenon is hardly unique, as New City and its linguistic equivalents is one of the most common city names in the world. It’s also an illustrative example of how place names seem to defy their original meaning. Just look at some of the English new cities and how strange it feels to do a surface analysis of their names: Newcastle, Newton, Newport, New Haven.
Most cities originally named New City get renamed if they become important and well-known, so I enjoy marveling at the ones that never did. Но́вгород (Novgorod) is Russian for Newtown. Villanova is Italian for New Village. 𐤒𐤓𐤕-𐤇𐤃𐤔𐤕 (qrt-ḥdšt), romanized as Carthage, is Phoenician for New City. เชียงใหม่ (Chiiang Mai) is Thai for New City.
I also learned that while Kota Bharu is Malay for New City and Nevşehir is Turkish for New City, despite their significance and population, I had never encountered either name before.
If you enjoyed this exploration, you may also enjoy my much briefer history of pizza (1931).