How did hourglass happen? How did they even get the right amount/size of each sand particle/other physical aspects to be aligned with the time?
In: Physics
Lol in our house a board game hourglass runs a lot faster one way. We always play guys vs girls and the guys know which side is faster and make sure its the side the girls use. We normally still lose
The hourglass didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Before that people used things like the [clepsydra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_clock) which was a basin of water that flowed into another one and the rate it filled was used to mark time. The hourglass is just a dry, reusable (flip it instead of refilling it) version of that.
I think OP approached this thought from the angle of modern small hourglasses. In those, the sand is finer and the hole the sand pours through can have its width calculated to let x amount of sand through.
But the size of the hourglass wasn’t the variable that was changed back then. It was simply the amount of sand. All hour glasses were relatively large and could allow any size sand particle to move through it, and rather than trying to figure out how small they needed to make the neck, they just added more sand.
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