At one time in Tibet, the distance of a long journey was reportedly estimated in cups of tea. Not the physical dimensions of the cup, but how many cups of tea one would drink while en route. In rural Greece, the ‘cigarette’ served a similar function. In the Andes, a favored distance unit was the cocada, or mouthful of coca leaves. In native North America, ‘pipe bowl’ was used in this way; in parts of South East Asia, the go-to was ‘betel nut.’ In the Nicobar Islands, journeys by sea were reckoned in terms of the number of young coconuts drunk on the way [1]. These measures now seem quaint. Today, people the world over favor a few standardized abstractions to track their travels, chiefly kilometers and miles. But as cocadas, coconuts, and other consumption-based units show, a more locally inflected strategy once ruled the day: using time to measure space.
To appreciate the logic of this strategy, first consider a more common one: using space to measure space. Across societies and eras, when humans have wanted to characterize length, depth, height, or distance, the most obvious solution has been to reach for some physical point of comparison. Parts of the body—such as fathoms, forearms, fists, and finger-widths— are especially common. Objects like barleycorns and bows also serve well. As Dedre Gentner and I discuss in our paper on the history and diversity of length units, physical points of comparison like these have several virtues: they are widely available, portable, and more or less consistent in length. But they are also only practical at relatively small scales, such as when reckoning the length of a plank or a pig. How would one go about measuring bigger stretches of space? How would one reckon the dimensions of a house compound or a large field? In such cases, people start casting about for other solutions. We find units like a ‘stone-throw’ or ‘bow-shot’; the distance at which one can still hear a bull’s bellow or the human voice [2]. And at even larger scales—when estimating the distance between villages or islands, for example—people have often turned to time itself. Or, more precisely, to temporal points of comparison—like the span of time it takes to drink a cup of tea or exhaust a betel nut [3].
This is really the only practical solution. Mincing a trip of many miles into units based on the body would be incredibly tedious. (Just ask Oliver R. Smoot, who, one October night in 1958, stretched out 364 times to help determine the length of the Harvard Bridge—in ‘smoots’.) The work-around humans the world over have hit upon is to draw on some repeating event, some predictable unit of time. Irving Hallowell, an insightful ethnographic observer of indigenous measurement practices described these as “processual units.” He emphasized that they are “concrete and qualitative” and stand in contrast to units like miles that are “abstract” and “static.” Concrete and qualitative, yes—but perhaps not so different from the concrete units used on smaller scales. Like barleycorns and fathoms, such “processual units” are, in a sense, widely available, portable, and more or less consistent.
The most common processual unit appears to be the ‘day.’ While less exotic than the cocada or coconut, the logic is the same: A long distance is diced up according to the number of times that some determinate process unfolds. (‘Sleeps’ is also widely used, though this unit has different logic [4]). Dig a little deeper and we find local variation around precisely how ‘day’ has been used. Some communities had variants of this unit based on different modes of travel. The Mapuche used a measure based on a day on horse-back; the Aleutians distinguished a day by skin boat from a day on foot. Among the Saami, different days were distinguished based on who was doing the traveling. A ‘human day’ was the shortest; a ‘reindeer day’ was ten times longer; and a ‘wolf day’ was ten times longer than that [5].
Other groups developed units based on subdivisions of the day [6]. Naturally, with the advent of mechanical timepieces, hour and minutes became widely used. In cultures that lacked such devices, the day was sometimes subdivided in other ways. The Ojibwe reckoned that each half-arc of the sun—that is, from sunrise to zenith and then from zenith to sunset—could be considered four hand-stretches. To appreciate this, first fully stretch out the fingers of your hand—the distance from pinky tip to thumb=tip is a hand-stretch. Next, extend your arm toward the horizon, keeping it parallel to the ground. If you put your thumb-tip to the horizon and step your hand up one stretch at a time, you’ll see that this is about accurate. Using this method, one could talk about a portion of the day in terms of how many “hands” it was—a quarter of the day would be two hands, for instance—and thus one could also talk about a journey in terms of how many hands it would last. The result is a unit—the ‘hand’—that is ingenious, intuitive, and yet somewhat head-spinning: it uses space to measure time to measure space [7].
Exotic as such practices may seem, the impetus behind them is familiar, even to those of us used to miles and kilometers. We often report hiking or driving distances in terms of hours and minutes. There are a number of landmarks in my neighborhood that I walk to regularly—I can tell you instantly how long of a walk away they are, but would have to stop and think to report them in miles. Uses of time to measure space even creep into scientific discussions. Light-year, an astronomical term coined in the mid-1800s leverages the same logic. (As does its jocular cousin, the beard-second.) All these terms illustrate a force that has animated human measurement systems from their very beginnings: a drive to make our units practical, intuitive, and human scale.
Notes
1. For the ‘cup of tea’ measure in Tibet, see here. For the ‘cigarette’ measure in rural Greece, see here. All others are examples taken from Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) and are part of the database used in Cooperrider & Gentner (2019), available here.
2. ‘Stone throw’—once used in Burma—and ‘bow-shot’—once used in the Andaman Islands— are both in our HRAF database. In Measures and Men, Kula (1986, p. 8) reports that “bull bellows” were used in Latvia as recently as 1947. In the same discussion, he writes: “The Saharan nomads, for whom the exact distance from one water hole to another may be a matter of life or death, have a rich vocabulary of measures for long distances. Thus, they reckon in terms of a stick’s throw or a bowshot; or the carrying distance of the voice; or the distance seen with the naked eye from ground level, or from a camel’s back.” But the award for “most colorful unit” at this scale goes to one once used in Slovakia, according to Kula: “a hatchet’s throw backwards from a sitting posture” (p. 7).
3. We also use such spans of time to measure time, of course. In T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the narrator observes:
“For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons;
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
Sherlock Holmes sometimes described difficult cases in term of the number of pipes he would need to smoke to work them out—for instance, a “three-pipe problem.”
4. ‘Day’ and ‘sleep’ have both been widely used—and are superficially similar—but are in fact different kinds of measures. Both are countable, but while one can sensibly divide up ‘day,’ one cannot do the same with ‘sleeps’: Two and a half ‘days’ distant makes sense, but two and a half ‘sleeps’ distant does not. This is because ‘sleep’ is what might be called a “landmark unit”—it’s a method of estimating distance that involves counting the number of salient landmarks that one passes during a journey. Other “landmark units” from our HRAF database include marshes, capes, administrative posts, stream crossings, and coffee stops.
5. For these variants of day, see the HRAF database. We discuss the Saami case in Cooperrider & Gentner (2019).
6. The ‘day’—or some portion of it—has also often used in measures of land area. In Libya, a maizuura equaled the amount of land a camel could plow in a day (Behnke, 1980); in Germany, a ‘morning’ (morgen) originally referred to the amount of land one could plow before noon.
7. The remarkable case of the Ojibwe hand-as-distance unit is discussed in Jenness (1935).