History of the dema

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The dema, the basis of Sahar's metric time, is a time unit popular throughout Ekuosia, Soltenna, and other continents on the Prime Corridor.

Major outline:

  1. dema comes from a Classical Letsatian word meaning "period of time" and could be used for anything from a minute to a few days
  2. medieval [Soltenna, Ekuosia, or both] started developing a clockwork industry, making things such as astronomical tools, musical automata, and writing machines
  3. Terminian automata makers figured out a way to make a seaworthy automaton
  4. because the Prime Corridor is so wide, there was a search for finding longitude on it
  5. Terminians (and possibly a lot of people) split the globe up into 100 equally spaced longitudinal meridians
  6. a Terminian scientist figured out that with this nice clockwork, if you compared local sundial time with a bit of machinery, you could calculate your longitude
  7. this device was mostly manufactured in Terminia, so a lot of the Prime Corridor had these devices to find their longitudes
  8. they were clockwork, and so various sailors started using them to tell time (it's been 3 longitude units since the last break)
  9. the word dema was adopted to cover this time period of 14.4 minutes, semantically narrowing it
  10. dema time remained mostly maritime (slowly getting in a few industries) until industrialization
  11. by the dawn of industrialization, most dockworkers in most ports on the prime corridor were at least familiar with dema time (though not necessarily using it for their primary time keeping system)
  12. In modern times, most countries use demas for most or all international affairs, but some countries have an additional local system for some aspects of society.