Timekeeping has a long, interesting history

"You'll never hear them!" screamed the Duke. "I slew time in this castle many a cold and snowy year ago."

Hark stared at him emptily and seemed to be chewing something. "Time froze here. Someone left the windows open."

— James Thurber, "The 13 Clocks"

Ahh, Sunday is the end of daylight-saving time. Go to bed. Sleep in. Magically gain an hour of time.

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Physicists Jack Parry, left, and Louis Essen, in 1955, with cesium atomic clock they developed, accurate to one second in 300 years, at National Physical Laboratory.

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Pretty nice, huh? Creation of time ex nihilo with a simple twist of the clock dial.

But wait a minute, you say — that hour didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the repayment of a one-hour loan we granted the universe back in April, when we set our clocks one hour ahead. All right — so where has that hour been all this while?

Being as it is an amalgam of nature and artifice, time is a tricky thing. The only natural divisions of time we use are years (the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun), days (one rotation of the Earth) and lunar months (the time it takes the moon to wax and wane). Hours, minutes and seconds are all human constructs.

Twenty-four-hour days, for example, are a carryover from ancient Egyptian sundials that arbitrarily divided the daylight into 12 equal segments. Sixty-minute hours and 60-second minutes are a carryover from the ancient Mesopotamian sexigesimal (base 60) numbering system.

After their revolution, the French attempted a short-lived time-keeping system based on the more common decimal (base 10) system, but it never caught on.

"We could no more find our clock time in nature than we could find a wooden chair sprouting from the soil or a sweater growing from a sheep's back," said Jo Ellen Barnett, author of the book "Time's Pendulum."

Deseret News graphic Cesium atomic clock diagram Requires Adobe Acrobat.

Time was inextricably tied to nature — the sun, the moon, the seasons — through most of human existence.

Eventually, however, the Greeks and others began imposing themselves on time by, for example, marking gradations on sundials indicating divisions of time during the day.

Water clocks, which measured time by the flow of water through a basin's hole, were developed to tell time indoors or on overcast days or at night. Hourglasses did the same thing with sand. Simple (and wildly inaccurate) mechanical clocks were created.