In the beginning, no one cared about time. When the sun was out, it was light; at night, it was dark. Those eclipses freaked people out.
When being chased by a lion, you only need to run faster than the person next to you. Nobody cared about their time.
Around 1500 BC, the first sundials were used to tell time. At the equinox, there are 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of darkness each day. At midday, the sun is directly overhead, casting no shadow on a sundial.
I say midday rather than noon. The term noon is derived from the number nine. Nine hours after sunrise is 3 pm. Monks would fast until noon. Getting hungry, they slipped the meaning of “noon” to 12 pm.
Because there are a little over 12 lunar cycles per year and 12 finger joints on each hand, the ancient Babylonians used a base-12 system. Which, they used to segment parts of the day.
Since 60 is a special number, it is divisible by all integers from 1 to 6. The ancients divided each of the 12 segments into 60 minutes, and each of the 60 minutes into 60 seconds. Using sundials to time races was inaccurate, and few records were kept.
With these concepts, hourglasses and water clocks were used to record elapsed times.
By 1300, the first mechanical clocks were developed using oscillating gears that allowed them to move once each second.
In the early 1800s, the first mechanical stopwatches were developed. King Louis XVIII liked horse racing and wanted to know how long each race lasted. Some of the original timepieces’ rhythm was 216,000 vibrations per hour (60 per second). By the 1900s, the standard vibration was 18,000 or 36,000 vibrations per hour (5 or 10 per second).
Using these devices, world records were recorded to the tenth of a second until 1977. While in high school in the early 1970s, our coaches and track meets used mechanical stopwatches.
Because of individual reaction times, multiple watches were used to time a race, with the recorded times averaged. We were told to use our index finger rather than our thumb on the button, as index fingers reacted faster.
With the development of the transistor in the 1940s and the microprocessor in the early 1970s, small electronic stopwatches were introduced. The first one I saw in 1974 was the size of a current smartphone, still recording to the tenth of a second.
By 1977, FAT (Fully Automated Timing) systems had been developed and accepted for race timing and world record recognition.