However, with sunset and sunrise changing throughout the year, this meant the hour had to move with the seasons, expanding in summer and contracting in winter. These so-called temporal hours were inherited by Europeans in the Middle Ages and meant that the length of the hour in London, for example, could vary from 38 to 82 minutes.28 This fact was not so much unnoticed in this period as much as it was an observation that would simply have made no sense. Thinking of the hour as a consistent measure was not a familiar concept for most people, while the minute and second didn’t exist as common
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