A Brief History of Time

By Catherine Rose

For thousands of years human beings have used devices invented to measure the passage of time. As the sun moved across the sky, people were able to measure the day’s passing with obelisks and sundials, by monitoring their shadows. Some of the earliest clocks were stone obelisks built by the ancient Egyptians in 3500 BC. Sundials, which show the height of the sun using a shadow-casting rod called a gnomon attached to a marked plate, feature widely across many ancient cultures including in India. The world’s biggest sundial dates from the sixteenth century and can still be visited at Jantar Mantar in Jaipur. 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:“…he drew a dial from his poke [bag].” However, measuring time using the sun is problematic, as it only works during daylight hours when it is not cloudy. To overcome this and determine time at night, another method used graduated candles whose measured burn could also calculate passing hours. In around 1400 BC the ancient Greeks built water clocks, but they were probably invented in ancient Egypt. Known as clepsydrae, they basically 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. Subsequent developments of the water clock resulted in increasingly complex use of floats and gears that moved a hand on a face, anticipating the modern clock. From the seventh century the Chinese not only built huge water clocks but also more accurate timepieces, based on similar principles that employed mercury. In the eleventh century an Arab engineer named Ibn Khalaf Al-Muradi built a water clock with a sophisticated gear mechanism,

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which almost certainly influenced the subsequent invention of the mechanical clock. Another popular and iconic timepiece was the hourglass. Consisting of two blown glass bulbs joined by a narrow neck and commonly filled with sand, hourglasses work on a similar principle to the water clock. 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 mechanical clocks were made to strike the hour rather than display time. Operated by weights, these clocks were usually large and 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, which heralded portable clocks and watches. The oldest pocket watch is the spherical Melanchthon Watch made in 1530. In 1656 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. Thomas Tompion is known as the Father of English Clockmaking. Born in Bedfordshire in 1639, the thatched cottage where he grew up can still be seen in the small village of Ickwell. The son of the village blacksmith, he was apprenticed to a clockmaker in London, eventually becoming renowned for his clock and watchmaking skills. His timepieces were so well made that many of them are still in operation and command very high prices. A favourite with royalty, two of his ‘year clocks’ still reside at Buckingham Palace. During the nineteenth century, industrialisation made it more important to keep track of time and the ownership of pocket watches expanded greatly. We tend to think of the wristwatch as being a relatively modern invention but in fact they have been around for a lot longer. It is recorded that a 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. It was purportedly described at the time as an ‘armlet’ having: “…in the closing thearof a clocke, and in the forepart of the same a faire lozengie djamond without a foyle, hanging thearat a rounde juell fully garnished with dyamondes and a perle pendaunt.” However, any timepieces worn on the wrist were seen as no more than ladies’ jewellery, and the first purpose-built wristwatches for men 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.