Before the advent of cheap watches, mechanical watches, and other advanced products of the sort, there was an evolution of time keeping that occurred.  In the earliest of civilizations, before time keeping was extremely accurate, people used interesting and quite scientific methods for keeping track of the flow of time.

Once society became coherent and educated, the intelligent of the day figured out ways to know the time, month, and season via where the stars were in the sky.  This involved a lot of advanced calculations and invented tools.  The Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas are some of the people most famous for their unique ways of time keeping, and travelers still can make use of their systems to this very day.

As time progressed, time keeping systems regressed from the outermost celestial bodies and to the ones more closer to us, such as the sun and moon.  The months we follow currently are based on the sun, while certain other countries track their months on the cycles of the moon.  The discrepancies in these cycles are not too large, but there is definitely a noticeable difference.

Currently the focus has been on the more broader aspects of time, but in our daily lives, what really matters is the time of day.  We each do certain things in the morning, others in the afternoon, and yet more activities at night.  While you can somewhat guess the time based on how light it is out, it is very difficult to pinpoint the exact time.  The sun dial was a practical solution that let everybody know what time it was.  It operates by casting a thin shadow from its style (the thin, vertical apparatus stretching from the dial), and where that shadow falls depends on the position of the sun.   For a sun dial to be accurate, it must be set up in a certain way, such that it is pointing true North and is aligned properly with the rotation of the Earth.

Since sun dials are hard to set up and are not very practical for the individual, mechanically-minded beings figured out how to make smaller time keeping devices, such as pocket and wristwatches.  The earliest watches were very basic and were prone to breaking quickly, but we all know to what extent watchmaking has progressed to today.  Some watches are impervious to bullets and sharp drops, and many have features that people did not even dream about just one hundred years ago.

Incoming search terms:

• a very cheap pocket watch