Compare and Contrast: Sundial and Digital Watch
By: Kornchanok Eiamsantipaisarn (Erng) G.10M
Time is a very important thing in the world whether today or in the past. People started to measure time by notice the sun came up over the eastern horizon and went down at the western horizon. Around 1500 B.C., Mesopotamian people started to invent sundial to measure time by looking at the shadow during a day, but not during night time. In1957, The Hamilton Watch Co of Lancaster, Pennsylvania has produced the world first digital watch. People can measure time by just looking at their digital watch on their wrist. It will show the exact time with hour, minute, and second. There are many differences between sundial and digital watch. These include the materials that use to make, the way to watch the time, and design.
Materials that use to make sundial and digital watch are not the same materials because of the different between generations. According to sundial history (n.d.) on accurate sundial website, Mesopotamian people used gnomon consisted of pillar. The length of the pillar’s shadow to tell people time during a day. Sundial need to put on the space where the sun can light through. Nowadays, with a high technology, people invented microchip which will create a system and showed the time in number in a form of wristband (watch). People will have more comfortable to know the time by just looking at their wrist. Digital watch can tell exact time no matter it is day time or night time with minute and second unlike sundial that can tell time during day time and but people need to predict minute and second by themselves. With a digital watch, it has functions in which sundial didn’t have which are timing, alarm clock, and it also telling date, day, and month.
The way how people watch time in sundial and digital watch are also very different. Taken by The History of Sun Clock (n.d.) on fi.edu website, Mesopotamian people looked at the shadow of the sundial to measure the time in hour and minute only. Sometimes it might not tell the exact time or can’t tell the time because of the rain or other natural phenomena. According to the second paragraph, the way to know time is to look at small screen on wrist in which it will show time in number with hour, minute, second, date, day, and month. Digital watch has shown more details than the sundial. It makes people to not waste their time walking to look at the sundial when people want to know what time is it now.
Another point that is very different is design. The design of the sundial is very big. Some of the sundials were also having high base to contain sundial. As Instructions for mounting and using your sundial (n.d.) at hilaroad website has said that the shape of the sundial was rectangle with numbers to tell the time in a form of protractor (6 to 12 curves up, and 10-6 curves down using of geometry methods). Mesopotamian people can share one sundial with too many people, but for the digital watches, it is just for one person. There are too many design of digital watch today because people have more want then the designer who has to design the watches has to create new designs of watch to make people but their products. Marketing is the course of the new design. As the first paragraph has said that time is very important, so people need to buy watch to know the time. That’s why many designs have coming out every months and why people have to develop the watches.
In conclusion, sundial and digital watch are very different from each other. Today, the new era of a very high technology, people have developed thing for their comfortable of living. Including an important thing like clock, people have developed clock to become small and it is easy to take a clock wherever they want to. Many design of digital watches make people want to buy and choose the one that suitable for them. Everyone want more comfortable and look cool, that’s why they have to develop things and change things from the past. However if there is no sundial, there is also no watch today.
Works Cited
History of Sundial. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2010, from Sun Clock: http://www.fi.edu/time/Journey/Sundials/aboutsd.htm
Instructions for mounting and using your sundial. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2010, from Hila Binary Sundial: http://hilaroad.com/camp/projects/sundial/sundial.html
Sundial history. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2010, from Accurate sundial: http://www.accuratesundials.com/site/591582/page/143772
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