A Brief History of Time
By Katherine Rose
heavy so tended to feature in church towers. The clock in Salisbury Cathedral is one of the oldest surviving examples of a working mechanical clock, built in 1386 out of hand-worked iron. In 1450 the coiled spring mechanism was invented, heralding portable clocks and watches. The oldest pocket watch is the spherical Melanchthon Watch made in 1530.
For thousands of years human beings have used devices invented to measure the passage of time.
T
he earliest monitored the sun’s shadows using stone obelisks and sundials.
Sundials remained in popular use until the nineteenth century. During Shakespeare’s time, people even carried pocket sundials, referred to by the bard in his play As You Like It. However, measuring time using the sun only works during daylight when it is not cloudy. Another method was to use graduated candles whose measured burn could also calculate the passing of hours, especially at night. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks built water clocks. Known as clepsydrae, they basically 40
consisted of two containers, one placed higher than the other. Water would drip slowly from the top container to the bottom, while markers inside the lower container showed how much time had elapsed. Another popular and iconic timepiece was the hourglass. They were reasonably accurate and used to measure time at sea. Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan had eighteen hourglasses on each of his ships during a circumnavigation of the globe in 1522. Even today we still use the minute version to time the perfectly boiled egg! It was around the fourteenth century that the first mechanical clocks with gears and escapements were invented in Europe. The old English word for a clock was daegmael meaning ‘day measure’. It was at this time that the word ‘clock’ came into parlance, derived from the Latin word clocca meaning ‘bell’, as the first mechanical clocks were made to strike the hour rather than display time. Operated by weights, these clocks were usually large and
In 1650 Christiaan Huygens invented the first pendulum clock, which kept time more accurately than anything previously. It was found that the longer the pendulum, the greater the accuracy, which is how the Grandfather clock developed. Pendulum clocks remained the standard right up until the invention of quartz clocks in 1927. During the nineteenth century, industrialisation made it important to keep track of time and the use of pocket watches exploded. We tend to think of the wristwatch as being relatively modern but in fact it goes back a lot longer. It is recorded that a jewelled bracelet with a portable coiled spring timepiece was made for Queen Elizabeth I and given to her as a gift by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in 1571. However, such timepieces were seen as no more than ladies’ jewellery. The first purposebuilt wristwatches were not produced until the early 1900s. Today, we have seen the advent of the digital watch, mechanisms that no longer need winding, and atomic clocks accurate to a second within 100 million years – more than the length of human timekeeping itself. wolverhampton west magazine
