Like before the Internet/tv/radio etc how the hell did people organise anything or do anything on time? How did they synchronise their clocks?
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People would set their watches to whatever the largest and most visible clock in town was. (Church, Town Hall, Courthouse, etc.) It wasn’t until the railroads started becoming more prominent and widespread that the concept of a uniform “true” time became necessary, because people far away needed to know exactly where other trains were and when.
I remember there was a phone number, which you call and the automatic voice tells you the current time.
Do you mean before or after clocks? The mechanical clock wasn’t invented until 1270 or so, and didn’t become common until the 17th century for public display and the 18th century for personal ownership by ordinary people. Before clocks the simple answer is time was less important. To the average person, they got up when the sun came up, worked when there was work to be done, ate when they were hungry (assuming they had food), and went to bed when they were tired. You can keep track of what day it is without a clock, so they knew when to go to Church. It simply wasn’t important to the average person whether it was 2pm or 3pm.
This laissez faire attitude towards what time it is quickly went away after trains were invented. Before trains, it might be 1 PM in Boston, 1:15 in New York, and 1:30 in Philly and it didn’t really matter. But once you started running trains between major cities, keeping a schedule became very important. So you can thank trains for aligning what time it was, at least in cities served by trains.
In Edinburgh, Scotland. we had a royal observatory on a hill in the centre of the city which used observations to set their clock to the correct time.
Then there was a ball on top of a tower on the hill that would drop at 1PM, it’s where the New York New Year ball drop comes from.
Then a person in Edinburgh castle which is on an extinct volcano in the city centre would see the ball drop and fire a cannon, so the people of Edinburgh and the ships in the docks could set their clocks, so pretty boring normal stuff.
They still fire the cannon every day at 1PM, but it’s more a tourist thing now.
Generally people didn’t fret about exact time – ‘near enough’ was sufficient for most people (outside of sciences). As stated elsewhere, everyone set their pocket watch to whatever the town clock showed.
There’s a shortwave radio station in the US called WWV, run by the government, that broadcasts the time continuously. I think it started around the 1920s.
POPCORN!
Lots of responses to “early days”, one European response. For the pre-internet but post phone era, In the US, calling 767-#### got you the time from the phone company. Always a busy tone on 31st Dec though.
In old times people also followed the church bells. Even today some churches still run the bells at each hour.
When I was a kid, in my country, firemen use to ring the siren at noon, and in some cities they would also fire a cannon. Basically everything is easier if one person only keeps track and the rest just follow this person.
The sun was a huge factor. Sun-up, sun-down, and noon were easy markers. Science (astronomy/ weather) still use “solar time” because the position of the sun means a lot more than the position of hands on the clock.
Public clocks and churches had bells. Bell towers were a big way to signal time.
Before internet-connected time, clocks would be off all the time. School bells were kind of vital because the clocks in different teachers’ rooms would be off from each other. How do you know when someone’s tardy if everyone goes by a different clock? You have the bell. In factory settings, a whistle would sound the shift changes to synchronize things.
Pre-internet era, being +/- 10 minutes was just part of the error bars.
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