The first clocks didn’t accurately measure seconds. If you lived before the 18th century or so, there was not need for much in the way of accurate timekeeping at all.
If you’re a medieval farmer, you need to be at church on Sunday morning, but they ring the bells to let you know when it’s time to head up the hill to the church. Otherwise, you have no firm commitments on your time. Just try to milk your cows in the same 30-minute window every morning.
Accurate timekeeping for your average individual became a necessity with the popularization of trains in the 19th century, because a railroad company needed to say their train would depart Chicago at precisely 11:38 AM. Even then, getting it down to the minute was still a technically impressive feat.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that we needed to measure time on the scale of seconds or smaller. Physicists needed to measure the movements of molecules, GPS systems needed to overcome time dilation due to relativity, race car drivers needed to know which car was 0.05 seconds faster to the finish line.
Even so, how often do you use seconds in your daily life? It doesn’t much matter if your toaster toasts for 87 seconds instead of 90, or if you arrive at a meeting at 10:00:04 instead of 10:00:00. Most of the timekeeping functions in your life could be off by about 5-10 seconds and it wouldn’t make a lick of a difference.
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