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The historical significance of urban centers
The impact of cultural and technological advances
The role of urban centers in shaping society
The history of the second
The second as we know it was one introduced in the late 1500s when the Gregorian calendar began to spread across the globe alongside British colonialism.
The Gregorian calendar defined a day as a single revolution of the Earth about its axis. A day could be divided into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds.
Yet, the second was more a mathematical idea than a useful unit of time.
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Finding the right element
Before timekeeping could go fully atomic, countries had to decide which atom would work best.
At the Thirteenth General Conference of the International Committee for Weights and Measures in 1967, researchers decided on Cesium-133.
The element conformed to the following specifications...
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The cesium standard
Determining how many ticks of a caesium atom were in a second, the conference used the most precise astronomical measurement of a second available at the time.
They started with the number of days in a year and divided it down. Compared to the atom’s ticking rate, one second was de...
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The growing importance of the second
The second only became important when society became interconnected through fast-moving railways where cities needed to agree on exact timekeeping.
By the 1950s, several global systems required every second to be accounted for with as much precision as possible.
Today, devices are sy...
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Atomic clocks
As early as 1955, researchers started to develop atomic clocks, which relied on the laws of physics to establish a new foundation for timekeeping.
An atom consists of negatively charged electrons orbiting a positively charged nucleus at a consistent frequency. You can light...
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The history of Valentine's Day
Saint Valentine of Rome was added to the Catholic calendar by Pope Gelasius in 496. By the mid-17th century, the celebration of Valentine's day in England was customary.
The first commercial valentines day appeared in England at the end of the 18th century. They combined traditional symbo...
The early history of iron exploitation
Iron has been collected, mined and processed into its metallic form since 1200 BCE. Large scale production only started in 1750, at the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Steel, an alloy of Iron and Carbon is known for its purity and strength, and was patented by British ...
The Evolution Of "Productivity"
- Back in the Industrial Revolution context, productivity was translated into the amount of production per factory or per worker for a given day.
- These days the discussion revolves more about personal productivity and it relates to how much w...
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