What I mean to ask is that how did people coordinate day to day activities without a universal date and time system? And how did the current date and time system get implemented universally?
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Trains. I think the advent of trains is what popularized timetable systems that the majority of the population followed.
I have pulled this fact from the dark cobwebby recesses of my brain.
Just like how you can navigate via longitude and lattitude, or you can navigate via landmarks you can organize your schedule with numbers (clocks and dates) or references to daily or annual events in nature (landmarks).
Specific time keeping doesn’t really matter when you’re a serf. Snow’s melting? Time to get the fields ready for the next planting season. Sun is at the high point in the sky? Let’s break for food.
Why would you need universal time and date to cooperate? Sun is still setting the same way. You actually do not need to keep a tight schedule, its not like you will postpone your daily activities because of a lunch with inlaws or extra work your recieved at your office job.
As for when date and time systems got implemented. The Anno Domini calendar which would currently be 2023 was “created” in 6th century, adopted in Europe during 8th and 9th and with the European colonial domination spread globally. It never was only type of year couting and even today, many different countries use many different calendars, meaning that your year 2023 is someone else 1460 or 4560.
Dividing days into hours and hours into minutes and seconds comes from the first civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Clocks had been in existence since at least the ancient Egyptians who used sundials. Accurate clocks however were invented as the result of trains.
Clocks literally helped the trains arrive on time, as before those clocks the local time varied from town to town. So for the trains to maintain a schedule standardized clocks were required.
Clocks and watches were also important for navigation on ships.
Before such clocks time simply didn’t matter the same way.
A farmer would get up at dawn and do what he needed to do. The concept of a work shift didn’t come into existence until the industrial age.
The only day that really mattered was Sunday because that was the day you went to church. Every other day was just another work day.
Clocks are one of the oldest of human inventions–pretty much dating back to the start of civilization itself. Prior to then, people undoubtedly lived in small communities and could coordinate informally: imagine, if you will, living amongst about 100 family members and relatives in a compound with no-one else around. You probably could coordinate things with a rough “let’s go now” or “tomorrow morning we’ll go.”
As villages grew, central time keeping systems were invented to display the time–for example, large clocks on clock towers, or churches ringing church bells, to keep events coordinated within a village. Different villages didn’t synchronize times between each other–but then, if the major way to go between villages is by a multi-day journey on foot, it kinda didn’t matter.
But as someone else pointed out, it was the creation of trains and train timetables that created the need for synchronized clocks and timezones.
I live in Northern Canada. The farther North you go, the sun never sets. I’ve been in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut which is at the 69th parallel where you wake up in June at 2:00 am and you’re totally disoriented because it looks like noon outside and there’s kids driving their bikes around. I’m told that in the old days, the Inuit would just sleep when they were tired when they were travelling in the land because they didn’t know what time it was. Funny enough, Cambridge Bay was a DEW (Distant Early Warning) line station in the Cold War. They still have an air raid siren that goes off every day at 12 noon and 10 pm so that’s one way to tell time.
You coordinated day activities by the position of the sun in the sky. Sundials are very old, but even without them, you can tell where the sun is. People didn’t really travel far or fast enough to notice the difference when you travel east/west.
With the first actual clocks, the town would be responsible for measuring solar noon and adjusting the town’s central clock to hit noon at “mean solar noon,” the average time solar noon occurs each day (it does drift a little throughout the year). Anyone with their own clock could adjust theirs to match the town’s clock. This is also why bells chime on the hour, to tell everyone what time it is. Some places also fired a cannon at noon. This would mean neighboring towns could have different times by a few seconds, but it wasn’t really a big deal because, again, people didn’t travel fast or far enough for it to matter.
Once trains were invented, you could go between stations in towns that were minutes apart, so it was very hard to schedule arrival and departure times because you had dozens of stations with different times. This is when timezones were invented. In a timezone, there would be someone from the government to tell everyone when it is mean solar noon by telegraph. This allowed every town to synchronize their clocks to that, rather than the sun. This allowed the trains to schedule easier because they only had to account for time changes by crossing timezones, and the change is always an hour (or half hour in special cases).
Today, it’s all handled by the internet, but some of this old system still survives. If you listen to the radio, you may notice a tone at noon. That is the radio station telling you it’s noon, so you can set your clock to the correct time.
People have touched on your questions and trains are indeed a main reason times got standardized. I just wanna elaborate on one earlier use of accurate timekeeping: finding longitude when at sea. Latitude (where you are north/south) is relatively easy by checking the positions of stars at night – how high above the horizon the north star is or whatever – but longitude (east/west) is harder because the earth’s rotating. But if you have an accurate clock, that keeps correct time even as the ship is tossed about on the sea, you can check the sun’s position in the sky when your clock says noon (so the sun is directly overhead where you started from) – the difference in the sun’s position from directly overhead tells you how far east or west you are from the starting point. Britain’s Parliament set up a big cash prize for anyone who could come up with an accurate method in 1714 and a guy named John Harrison spent almost fifty years perfecting a clock to do it (and then getting them to give him the prize money he deserved).
Before calendars and basic timekeeping people did their best to guess when they should plant, travel and perform other task based on the seasons. An old wise person that just knew what marked the start of spring and could predict what would be blooming and where could be vital to a group’s survival.
Sumerians developed the first calendar, numbering days, about 5000 years ago. Despite being imperfect it was an important development and made it easier for people to mark seasons and the past, and make predictions for the future. It also was very useful for people to make legal agreements about things that might be delivered, and when.
Before the 20th century and the near universal adoption of the Gregorian calendar many calendars were used, often creating confusion. Even today getting everyone to agree on time is quite a challenge. Even now the ITU (whom define UTC) are working with the General Conference on Weights and Measures to attempt to come up with a Coordinated Universal Time that eliminates leap seconds.
People didn’t really keep time before. In Europe the church bells would ring at specific hours and that was precise enough for most daily activities. People just didn’t expect more precision and since travel was slow, constant delays were just a normal part of life.
You have to remember that up until the 19th century, populations were much, much smaller than today. In 1750 there were only 650,000 people in all of London which was one of the biggest cities in the world. In 1821, it was already more than twice that number.
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