Articles
Ancient or modern clocks, watches all very similar
Although modern clocks have changed radically from those early mechanical pendulum clocks, grown much smaller, and even turned into portable configurations like wristwatches, the basic principles and basic parts in most 20th and 21st century mechanical and electrical clocks are fundamentally the same as they were in 15th and 16th century Europe:
1. An oscillator -- Older mechanical clocks used the regular "vibration" or swing of a pendulum or balance wheel. Modern clocks use a vibrating quartz material, a tuning fork, and/or an electrical current.
2. A controller -- In mechanical clocks, this was a device that gave a "push" to the pendulum or balance wheel to replace energy lost to friction, and it also served to regulate, i.e., divide into regular measurable intervals, the motion of the pendulum or balance wheel. In mechanical clocks this was called the "escapement," and it involved gears and levers that controlled the pendulum. In modern clocks, it's generally an electrical circuit.
3. A power source -- In mechanical clocks this was a weight suspended from a cord draped over a pulley -- or a spring, i.e., the clock's mainspring. In most modern clocks, the power comes from a battery or electrical current, although some still use mainsprings that require winding.
4. A counter chain -- This is the device that counts the pulses or motion and adds it up into seconds, minutes, hours, etc., in mechanical clocks and in modern clocks it does the same thing for the pulses from an electrical current or vibrating quartz.
5. An indicator -- In the oldest mechanical clocks there was no readable "dial" or "face," so the indicator was usually a chime or bell that rang at regular intervals. The earliest clocks with faces or dials were analog clocks which display the time as moving hands that revolve around a circle with marked intervals on it. Modern clocks and watches are either analog or digital, i.e., a changing light display of numeric digits indicating the time.
How would our world be different if clocks had never been invented? No one can say. As humans, we're always conscious of sequence in the world and in our lives. We live from past to present to future -- and even if what we call "clocks" had never been invented, time would still exist and we still would have found some way to track it. Wall clocks, table clocks, wristwatches -- even that beautiful Bulova Men's Marine Star Chronograph Watch given to you by Grandpa last Christmas! -- of some sort would have been invented by someone somewhere.
But what an amazing debt we owe to clocks and timepieces. Without them, it's hard to imagine an industrialized world. A world without clocks and watches would be chaotic. Even if we're casual about dates, time frames, schedules, deadlines, and all the rest -- we still rely on marking and measuring the time to mark and measure our lives.
Like it or not we live the way we do because of clocks and watches. Whether we're using them to add beauty to our homes and gardens, or demanding the utmost in timekeeping accuracy, we run our world by our clocks and watches.
Always a good time for clocks and watches
Clocks and watches have always fascinated me. As a kid, anytime I found an old clock or watch around, I was eager to see how it worked, to take it apart -- and don't remember ever getting one successfully put back together again.
My grandfather had an old pocket watch he swore was a jeweled mechanism "railroad man's watch," which meant nothing to me but it conveyed the air of mystery and importance that has always surrounded time and timekeeping for me.
From sundials tracking day into night to atomic clocks that are accurate to within small fractions of a second, and from water clocks to titanium digital wristwatches, clocks have been around in one form or another as long as the human race has been around. We've always had some concept of time, of progression from past to present, and we've created a whole culture of timepieces to keep track that progression.
Ancient timepieces probably began with simple sundials, probably starting out as simple as a stick in the ground with a circle of markings that tracked the stick's shadow as the sun moved. Sundials became more than simple sticks, however, taking on decorative appearance and being constructed of stone and bronze for year-around, all-weather durability. Today, sundials have become outdoor decor, gracing many lawns, gardens, and public places. Not reliable enough for modern culture, these practical timekeepers of prehistory and ancient times have become lovely symbols of homage to the fundamental nature of time for many of us.
As civilization progressed, our desire to order past, present, and future brought the invention of ever more elaborate and accurate clocks. Although sundials seemed obvious as a way of measuring the passage of time during a day, the most elaborate ancient clocks used for several millenia (until the advent of European pendulum clocks) were water clocks. No one, really, can be credited as the inventor of the water clock, although there are ancient Egyptian records of water clocks. One of those Egyptian accounts was recorded in a tomb inscription of a 16th century BC Egyptian court official named Amenemhet, who was given credit for inventing that particular device.
But, since water clocks developed independently in many ancient Asian and Mediterranean cultures, old Amenemhet was probably getting more credit than he deserved. Most likely, water clocks developed throughout the ancient world as objects and ideas were spread around through various trade routes. These clever clocks have been found in records not only from Egypt but from Babylonia, China, Greece, Rome, India, and many other regions.
Water clocks were of two fundamental types -- inflow, where a measured rate and amount of water flowed into a basin or bowl, and outflow, where a measured rate and amount of water flowed out from a basin or bowl. Interestingly enough, while sundials focused on measuring units in a day, water clocks were structured around seasons and astrological symbols, then divided into smaller daily and hourly flow intervals.
The first real clocks as we "modern" people understand them were huge pendulum and gear contraptions. But unlike today's highly prized, antique or modern grandfather clocks, most of those pendulum clocks didn't even have what we would recognize as a "dial" or "face" to display time. Instead, such early clocks marked the time with chimes or bells.
These mechanical behemoths were often built into churches or high up on public towers. Such early mechanical clocks are known from written historical records to have been around in Europe and even China as early as 1000-1100 AD. None of those early clocks seem to have survived the ages. The earliest European clock still surviving and operating is one in Salisbury Cathedral in Britain. It dates from 1386.