On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > Pre-Orb, I doubt that the primitive Dragaeran tribes divided time that > finely. If I remember my Roman history, they had a 9-hour day, where the hour changed to accomodate the seasons, and they didn't account for hours at night, else they would have had 18-hour days. They had I suppose hour-glasses but relied on clepsydrae or water-clocks at some point. I wonder about Dragaeran music - perhaps they found some old metronomes... And of course they would have found old measuring sticks, which with a little physics knowledge left over from the pre-Jenoine times would have allowed them to measure time by dropping rocks. > BTW, I am not sure that the arrangement you describe would be > *impossible* without computers. > ... I think > a sufficiently clever engineer could make a mechanical clock/watch in > which an alternate gearing system would be used once every X hours. > At any rate, it doesn't necessarily require a digital computer. I assert that no technical preindustrial society would be able to support a system with varying-length hours, not simply because of the difficulty of keeping time, but the horror of accounting for time periods in contracts, between time zones, ...