The amount of time in a moment is 90 seconds, or one and a half minutes, according to its usage as a unit of time measurement in medieval times dating back to the 8th century. This was based on the positioning of shadows on a sun dial, in which shadows moved along the dial 40 times in an hour. After the invention of the mechanical clock in the 13th century, a moment was no longer widely used as a specific unit of measurement. Going forward in modern times, a moment began to be used as a figure of speech to refer vaguely to any very brief period of time.
More about measurements of time:
- Time has been measured since at least 1500 BC, which is the first instance of records indicating time measurement through the invention of the sundial by the ancient Egyptians.
- The word clock comes from the medieval Latin word for bell and refers to the bell that was used to signal that it was time for monks to pray.
- The poet Miroslav Holub proposed in 1990 that a moment is the unit of time it takes a person to read a average line of verse.