A woman manually setting an analogue wall clock, showing how everyday timekeeping once depended on trusted reference points.
Nowadays, if you want to know the exact time, you just tap your phone screen.
You don’t even question whether it’s right because your mobile network keeps it synced down to the millisecond.
When Daylight Saving Time hits, your phone changes while you sleep without you doing a thing. It’s pretty luxurious when you think about it!
Considering the internet only really went mainstream in the late 90s and smartphones didn’t take off until after 2007, how on earth did people keep their clocks accurate back in the day?
As it turns out, staying on schedule took a mix of public infrastructure, clever local hacks, and a whole lot of physical effort. Here is how people kept their clocks in sync throughout history:
1. The “Speaking Clock” Phone Numbers
If you grew up in the 70s, 80s, or 90s, you probably remember this classic trick. For decades, you could dial a specific local phone number (like POPCORN in parts of the US or 123 in the UK) to hear a recorded voice count down the time down to the second, followed by a sharp beep.
Because phone companies wired these systems straight into official government time standards, it was dead accurate.
2. Radio and Television Time Signals
Broadcasters played a massive role in keeping households on time. Stations regularly played sharp audio cues right before top-of-the-hour news programs—like the BBC’s famous “pips.”
People would literally stand next to their wall clocks with a finger on the dial, waiting for that final tone to hit 12:00. Serious tech enthusiasts and sailors even tuned shortwave radios to government stations like WWV or CHU, which broadcast atomic clock ticks 24/7.
3. Jewellery Store & Town Square Clocks
Public clocks in stations and town centres helped many private clocks stay close to the same shared time.
Before radio was everywhere, getting the accurate time meant taking a walk down town. Local watchmakers and jewellery shops kept ultra-precise pendulum clocks (called regulators) sitting right in their front windows. Passers-by would stop on the side walk to match their pocket watches.
By the mid-19th century, companies like Western Union even sent daily electric time pulses down telegraph wires to sync master clocks in train stations and town squares across the country.
4. Radio-Controlled “Atomic” Clocks
By the late 80s and 90s, radio-controlled desk clocks became a popular household gadget. These little clocks had tiny built-in radio receivers tuned into low-frequency signals broadcast by government atomic clocks (like WWVB in Colorado or DCF77 in Germany).
Every night while you slept, the clock would silently listen for the signal and auto-correct its hands or digital display.
The Local Sundial (Solar Noon)
A weathered stone sundial shows how sunlight and shadow gave people a visible daily reference point for time.
Go back a few centuries, and the sundial was the ultimate master clock for a community. People used it to catch solar noon—the exact moment the sun reached its highest point in the sky and cast the shortest shadow—and set their mechanical clocks to 12:00 PM.
But there was a catch: Earth’s orbit isn’t a perfect circle, so solar days vary slightly throughout the year. To get exact mean time, folks had to check printed reference charts called the Equation of Time to add or subtract a few minutes.
6. Time Ball Towers & Signal Guns
In port towns during the 1800s, visual and audio signals were set up so whole harbour could sync at once.
A massive, brightly coloured metal ball was hoisted up a tower on an observatory or tall building. At precisely 1:00 PM (or noon), operators dropped the ball down a pole so ship captains out at sea and locals on shore could set their timepieces simultaneously.
Some towns skipped the ball entirely and just fired a loud cannon every day at noon!
7.Church Bells and Town Square Clocks
Most regular households didn’t actually own a clock until relatively late in history because mechanical gears were expensive luxury items. Instead, whole communities relied on a central church tower clock.
A designated clock keeper (horologer) was hired to wind, maintain, and calibrate the town clock using sundials.
The ringing of the bells on the hour served as the main audio signal for the entire surrounding area.
8. Door-to-Door Clock Setters
In major 18th and early 19th-century cities, accuracy was literally a paid subscription service. Specialised watchmakers would carry an ultra-accurate, portable marine chronometer around town on foot. Wealthy families and business owners paid a weekly fee to have the clock setter drop by their house and manually adjust their grandfather clocks and pocket watches to match the observatory standard.
9. Incense Clocks
In China, Japan, and Korea, incense clocks (xiangyin) were widely used in homes, temples, and government offices starting around the 6th century.
Incense powder was formulated to burn at remarkably steady rates—some simple sticks were marked with hour lines, while elaborate ones featured maze-like metal trails.
They even made “incense alarms” by tying small metal weights to threads along the trail; when the ember burned through the thread, the weight dropped into a copper basin with a loud gong!
10. The Muwaqqit & Mosque Sundials
During the Islamic Golden Age, precise timekeeping was essential for calculating daily prayer times and the direction of Mecca.
Major mosques employed specialised astronomers called Muwaqqits. Using astrolabes, quadrants, and wall sundials (mizwala), they calculated solar time down to the minute.
Once set, the call to prayer (Adhan) from the minaret acted as the main time signal for the whole city to set their routines.
11. Drum Towers & Night Watchmen
Tracking time at night when the sun was gone required a centralised civic system. Major Chinese cities built massive central towers housing giant drums and bells.
Timekeepers measured the hours using water clocks or incense and struck the drums to signal the night hours (geng). On the streets, night watchmen walked through neighbourhoods hitting wooden clappers (bangzi) or gongs in distinct patterns to let sleeping families know the hour.
12. Water Clocks (Clepsydras)
Long before mechanical gears existed, water clocks were the standard reference across ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece, medieval Europe, and Asia. T
hey worked by measuring the steady drip of water from one marked vessel into another. Some were amazingly complex engineering feats—like Su Song’s 35-foot water-powered clock tower in 11th-century China, or Al-Jazari’s famous Elephant Clock, which dropped metal balls into gongs every half-hour using submerged floating bowls.
13. Calibrated Candles & Oil Lamps
When you needed a simple personal timekeeper indoors at night, calibrated burning did the trick. King Alfred the Great of England famously used standardised beeswax candles marked with vertical inch lines, shielding them inside horn-walled lanterns so drafts wouldn’t mess up the burn rate.
Glass whale oil lamps worked similarly—they had numbered markings etched along the reservoir, so as the wick burned oil, the dropping liquid level showed you how many hours had passed overnight.
FAQs
How did people set watches before time zones existed?
Before railways forced time zones to standardise in the late 19th century, every town kept “local solar time.” Noon was defined simply as the moment the sun reached its highest point over your specific town square.
Because of this, two towns just 20 miles apart often had clocks set a few minutes different from each other!
What was the main reason society switched to unified time zones?
Train schedules! When railroads began criss-crossing countries in the 1800s, running fast trains on single tracks while every station used its own local town time led to massive schedule confusion and frequent, disastrous train crashes.
What was the easiest way for a regular family to set their clock in the 1950s?
Most households relied on daily radio or television news broadcasts. Families would tune in to the evening news and listen for the top-of-the-hour chime or audio “pips” to quickly adjust their wristwatches and mantle clocks.
Conclusion
It’s easy to take for granted that our phones handle timekeeping invisibly in the background. But for thousands of years, keeping accurate time was a hands-on, collective effort—whether that meant dialing a phone number to hear a recorded voice count down the seconds, watching a bright ball drop in a harbour, or listening for a church bell across town.
The next time your clock shifts automatically for Daylight Saving Time, spare a quick thought for the past—when keeping time meant checking the sun, burning a marked candle, or waiting for a noon cannon!