Candles to keep time?
My son is reviewing how to tell time on an analog clock. We were curious to find out some of the many ways people marked time before our modern clocks. We came across some interesting ones including ‘water clocks’. But one method that we decided to try was by burning a candle. Evidently, they knew how much time had passed when the candle burned to a certain mark. So we decided to give it a try.
We took a tapered candle and made 1/2 inch marks all the way down. We lit the candle and started our stop watch. We checked it every 5 minutes until it got close to the first mark. It took 26 minutes to burn to the first 1/2 inch mark! Then it took 16 minutes to burn to the second mark. The next was 13 minutes and after that one, it jumped back up to 27 minutes! The last 1/2 mark wasn’t reached for another 33 minutes!!!
We then put our information into a graph and decided that perhaps inconsistencies in the modern wax may have caused the drastically differing times. We concluded that this would not be a very accurate measure of time for us!
