Appendix A, _How it Works_ 230
Appendix B, _Bibliography_ 235
Appendix C, _American Watch Manufacturers (Chronology)_ 241
Appendix D, _Well Known Watch Collections_ 250
Appendix E, _Encyclopedic Dictionary_ 253
_ILLUSTRATIONS_
TO FACE PAGE
The Spirit of Time
The Cave Man and the Moving Shadow 16
Time Telling in the "Land Between the Rivers" 32
The First Recorded Sun Dial 40
The Clepsydra, or Water Clock 56
Types of the Earliest Time Tellers 64
Galileo Discovering the Principle of the Pendulum 72
A Time Piece of the Middle Ages 80
Ancestors of the Watch 88
The First Pocket Time Piece 96
The "Nuremburg Egg," the First Real Watch 104
First Forms of the Watch 112
Sixteenth Century Watches 120
Late—In Spite of His Two Watches 128
Seventeenth Century Watches 136
The Swiss "Manufacturer" and a Craftsman 144
The First Yankee Clock Maker 152
"Grandfather's Clocks" 160
Eighteenth Century Watches 168
"Quantity Production" in 1850 176
A Glimpse of a Giant Industry 200
Twentieth Century Watches 208
Time Telling in the Dark 216
Time Pieces Vital to Industry 224
_FOREWORD_
It was a moonless night in No Man's Land. A man in khaki stood silently
waiting in a frontline trench. In the darkness, his eyes were drawn,
fascinated, to the luminous figures on the watch-dial at his wrist.
A splinter of pale light, which he knew to be the hour-hand, rested
upon the figure 11. A somewhat longer splinter crept steadily from the
figure 12.
"Past eleven," he whispered to himself. "Less than twenty minutes now."
To the right and to the left of him, he, now and then, could see his
waiting comrades in the blackness of the trench, their outlines vaguely
appearing and disappearing with the intermittent flares of distant
star-shells. He knew that they, too, were intent upon tiny figures in
small luminous circles and upon the steady, relentless progress of
other gleaming minute-hands which moved in absolute unison with the
one upon his own wrist. He knew, also, that far in the rear, clustered
about their guns, were other comrades tensely counting off the passing
minutes.
At twenty minutes past eleven, the artillery bombardment would begin
and would continue until exactly midnight. Then would come the
barrage—the protecting curtain of bursting shells behind which the
khaki-clad figure and his companions would advance upon the enemy's
trenches—perhaps also upon eternity.
How strangely silent it seemed after the crashing chaos of the last
few days! There were moments when the rumble of distant guns almost
died away, and he could hear the faint ticking of his timepiece or a
whispered word out of the darkness near at hand. He likened the silence
to the lull before a storm.
Five minutes thus went by!
In another fifteen minutes, the fury of the bombardment would begin; it
would doubtless draw an equally furious bombardment from the enemy's
guns.
At twelve-ten plus forty-five seconds, he and his platoon were to "go
over the top" and plunge into the inferno of No Man's Land. That was
the moment set for the advance—the moment when the barrage would lift
and move forward.
The slender hand on the glowing dial stole steadily onward. It was ten
minutes after now.
Ten minutes after eleven—just one hour plus forty-five seconds to wait!
His thoughts flew back to his home in the great city beyond the sea.
Ten minutes after eleven—why that would be only ten minutes after
six in New York! How plainly he could picture the familiar scenes of
rushing, bustling life back there! Crowds were now pouring into the
subways and surface cars or climbing to the level of the "L's." This
was the third—the latest homeward wave. The five o'clock people had,
for the most part, already reached their homes and were thinking about
their dinner; the five-thirties were well upon their way.
How the millions of his native city and of other cities and towns, and
even of the country districts, all moved upon schedule! Clocks and
watches told them when to get up, when to eat their breakfasts, when to
catch their trains, reach their work, eat their lunches, and return to
their homes. Newspapers came out at certain hours; mails were delivered
at definite moments; stores and mills and factories all began their
work at specified times.
What a tremendous activity there was, back there in America, and how
smoothly it all ran—smooth as clock-work! Why, you might almost say it
ran _by_ clock-work! The millions of watches in millions of pockets,
the millions of clocks on millions of walls, all running steadily
together—these were what kept the complicated machinery of modern life
from getting tangled and confused.
Yes; but what did people do before they had such timepieces? Back
in the very beginning, before they had invented or manufactured
anything—far back in the days of the caveman—even those people must
have had _some_ method of telling time.
A bright star drew above the shadowy outline of a hill. At first the
man in khaki thought that it might be a distant star-shell; but no, it
was too steady and too still. Ah yes, the _stars_ were there, even in
the very beginning—and the moon and the sun, they were as regular then
as now; perhaps these were the timepieces of his earliest ancestors.
A slight rustle of anticipation stirred through the waiting line and
his thoughts flashed back to the present. His eyes fixed themselves
again on the ghostly splinters of light at his wrist. The long hand had
almost reached the figure 4—the moment when the bombardment would begin.
He and his comrades braced themselves—and the night was shattered by
the crash of artillery.
CHAPTER ONE
_The Man Animal and Nature's Timepieces_
The story of the watch that you hold in your hand to-day began
countless centuries ago, and is as long as the history of the human
race. When our earliest ancestors, living in caves, noted the regular
succession of day and night, and saw how the shadows changed regularly
in length and direction as day grew on toward night, then was the
first, faint, feeble germ of the beginning of time-reckoning and
time-measurement. The world was very, very young, so far as man was
concerned, when there occurred some such scene as this:
It is early morning. The soft, red sandstone cliffs are bathed in the
golden glow of dawn. As the great sun climbs higher in the eastern
sky, the sharply outlined shadow of the opposite cliff descends slowly
along the western wall of the narrow canyon. A shaggy head appears from
an opening, half-way up the cliff, and is followed by the grotesque,
stooping figure of a long-armed man, hairy and nearly naked, save for a
girdle of skins. He grasps a short, thick stick, to one end of which a
sharpened stone has been bound by many crossing thongs, and, without a
word, he makes his way down among the bushes and stones toward the bed
of the creek.
Another head appears at the same opening in the cliff—that of a
brown-skinned woman with high cheek-bones, a flat nose, and tangled
hair. She shouts after the retreating form of the man, and he stops,
and turns abruptly. Then he points to the edge of the shadow far above
his, and, with a sweeping gesture, indicates a large angular rock lying
in the bed of the stream near by. Apparently understanding the woman
nods and the man soon disappears into the brush.
The forenoon wears along, and the line of shadow creeps down the face
of the canyon wall until it falls at last across the angular rock
against which the dashing waters of the stream are breaking. The
woman who has been moving about near the cave opening begins to look
expectant and to cast quick glances up and down the canyon. Presently
the rattle of stones caught her ear and she sees the long-armed man
picking his way down a steep trail. He still carries his stone-headed
club in one hand, while from the other there swings by the tail the
body of a small, furry animal. Her eyes flash hungrily, and she shows
her strong, white teeth in a grin of anticipation.
[Illustration: THE CAVE MAN AND THE MOVING SHADOW
_"I'll be back when the shadow touches that stone." It was by such
crude expedients that our primitive ancestors timed their engagements._]
Perhaps it has not been hard to follow the meaning of this little drama
of primitive human need. Our own needs are not so very different,
even in this day, although our manners and methods have somewhat
changed since the time of the caveman. Like ourselves, this savage pair
awoke with sharpened appetite, but, unlike ourselves, they had neither
pantry nor grocery store to supply them. Their meal-to-be, which was
looking for its own breakfast among the rocks and trees, must be found
and killed for the superior needs of mankind, and the hungry woman had
called after her mate in order to learn when he expected to return.
No timepieces were available, but that great timepiece of nature, the
sun, by which we still test the accuracy of our clocks and watches,
and a shadow falling upon a certain stone, served the need of this
primitive cave-dweller in making and keeping an appointment.
The sun has been, from the earliest days, the master of Time. He
answered the caveman's purpose very well. The rising of the sun meant
that it was time to get up; his setting brought darkness and the time
to go to sleep. It was a simple system, but, then, society in those
days _was_ simple—and strenuous.
For example, it was necessary to procure a new supply of food nearly
every day, as prehistoric man knew little of preserving methods.
Procuring food was not so easy as one might think. It meant long and
crafty hunts for game, and journeys in search of fruits and nuts. All
this required daylight. By night-time the caveman was ready enough to
crawl into his rock-home and sleep until the sun and his clamoring
appetite called him forth once more. In fact, his life was very like
that of the beasts and the birds.
But, of course, he was a man, after all. This means that a human brain
was slowly developing behind his sloping forehead, and he could not
stop progressing.
After a while—a long while, probably—we find him and his fellows
gathered together into tribes and fighting over the possession of
hunting-grounds or what not, after the amiable human fashion. Thus,
society was born, and with it, organization. Tribal warfare implied
working together; working together required planning ahead and making
appointments; making appointments demanded the making of them _by_
something—by some kind of a timepiece that could indicate _more than
a single day_, since the daily position of light and shadows was now
no longer sufficient. Man looked to the sky again and found such a
timepiece.
Next to the sun, the moon is the most conspicuous of the heavenly
objects. Its name means "the Measurer of Time." As our first ancestors
perceived, the moon seemed to have the strange property of changing
shape; sometimes it was a brilliant disk; sometimes a crescent;
sometimes it failed to appear at all. These changes occurred over
and over again—always in the same order, and the same number of days
apart. What, then, could be more convenient than for the men inhabiting
neighboring valleys to agree to meet at a certain spot, with arms
and with several days' provisions, at the time of the next full
moon?—moonlight being also propitious for a night attack.
For this and other reasons, the moon was added to the sun as a human
timepiece, and man began to show his mental resources—_he was able to
plan ahead_. Note, however, that he was not concerned with measuring
the passage of time, but merely with fixing upon a future date; it was
not a question of _how long_ but of _when_.
This presumptuous, two-legged fighting animal, from whom we are
descended, and many of whose instincts we still retain, began to
enlarge his warfare, and thereby to improve his organization. For the
sake of his own safety, he learned to combine with his fellows, finding
strength in numbers, like the wolves in the pack; or, like ants and
bees, finding in the combined efforts of many a means of gaining for
each individual more food and better shelter than he could win for
himself alone.
For example, it was possible that a neighboring tribe, instead of
waiting to be attacked, was planning an attack upon its own account. It
would not do to be surprised at night. Sentries must be established to
keep watch while others slept, and to waken their comrades in case of
need. Our very word "watch" is derived from the old Anglo-Saxon word
"waeccan," meaning "wake." And yet people who tried to watch for long
at a stretch would be apt to doze. They must be relieved at regular
times; it was a matter of necessity, but how could one measure time at
night?
Where man has been confronted with a pressing problem he has generally
found its solution. Probably in this case the stars gave him a clue. If
the sky were clear, their positions would help to divide the night into
"watches" of convenient length.
Thus did primitive man begin to study the skies. No longer a mere
animal, he was beginning, quite unconsciously, to give indications of
becoming a student.
CHAPTER TWO
_The Land Between the Rivers_
Now we must jump over ages so vast in duration that all of our recorded
history is by comparison, the merest fragment of time. During the
prehistoric period, known to us only by certain bones, drawings, and
traces of tombs and dwellings, and by a few rude implements, weapons,
and ornaments, we must think of the human family as developing very,
very slowly—groping in the dawn of civilization while it ate and slept,
hunted, and fought, and, gradually spread over various regions of the
earth.
It was in this interval, also, that man learned the use of fire and
the fashioning of various tools. His club gave place to the spear, the
knife, and the arrow-head weapons that were made at first by chipping
flakes of flint to a sharp edge. Then, as his knowledge and skill
slowly increased, he learned to work the softer metals and made his
weapons and his tools of bronze. Meanwhile, he was taught, by observing
in nature, to tame and to breed animals for his food and use, and to
plant near home what crops he wished to reap, instead of seeking them
where they grew in a wild state. Thus, he became a herdsman and farmer.
He no longer lived in caves or rude huts, but in a low, flat-roofed
house built of heavy, rough stone, and, later, of stones hewn into
shape or of bricks baked in the burning sunshine. Stone and clay carved
or molded into images, and the colored earth, smeared into designs
upon his walls, gave him the beginnings of art. And from drawing rude
pictures of simple objects, as a child begins to draw even before
knowing what it means to write, primitive man came at last to the
greatest power of all—the art of writing.
Through all this age man continued to regulate his expanding affairs by
the timepieces of the sky—the sun, the moon, and the stars. He divided
time roughly into days and parts of days, into nights and watches of
the night, into moons and seasons—determining the latter probably
by the migration of birds, the budding of trees and flowers, the
falling of leaves and other happenings in nature. But never guessing
how greatly interested future generations would be in the way he did
things, he has left only a few records of his activities and these
have been preserved by the merest accident. The historian and the
press-agent were the inventions of later days.
Thus we come down the ages to a date about 4000 B. C. at the very
beginning of recorded history, and to one of the most ancient
civilizations in the world—that of the region which we now call
Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia lies in southwestern Asia between the Tigris
and Euphrates Rivers and not far from the traditional site of the
Garden of Eden. The name by which we know it comes from the Greek, and
means, "The land between the rivers" but the people who dwelt there at
the time to which we refer called it the "Land of Shinar."
This is the region in which long afterward—so the Bible tells
us—Abraham left his native town, Ur of the Chaldees, to make his
pioneer journey to Palestine. This is the land where the great
cities of Babylon and Nineveh afterward arose; Babylon, where Daniel
interpreted the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar, and Nineveh, whence the
Assyrians, the fierce conquerors of the ancient world, "came down
like a wolf on the fold" against the peaceful Kingdom of Judah. It
is the land where, thousands of years later, the famous Arab capital
of Bagdad was built; it is the land of Harun al Raschid and the
"Arabian Nights," and the land which the British Army conquered in a
remarkable campaign against the Turks and Germans. Mesopotamia is a
land of color, brilliant life, wonders and romance. Many students and
statesmen believe that it will, in days to come, grow fruitful and
populous again, that it will once more be great among the countries of
the earth. It is a flat region, with wide-stretching plains. For the
most part, there are no hills to limit the view of the skies, and the
heavens are brilliant upon starry nights.
In this favored portion of the earth, a high civilization had already
been developed in the very earliest days of which we have authentic
historic record. The caveman type had long disappeared and had been
forgotten; people were already living in well-built cities of brick
and stone. Their houses were low and flat-roofed, but the cities were
surrounded with high and massive walls to protect them from enemies,
and here and there within rose great square towers which were also
temples. Perhaps the famous Tower of Babel was one of these, for Babel,
of course, is another name for Babylon, and its people are known to
have worshipped on the tops of towers, as if, by so doing, they could
reach nearer to their gods. The ancient Chaldeans were religious by
nature, and because the skies contained the greatest things of which
they knew, they identified many of their gods with the sun, the moon,
and the stars, and they worshipped these in their temples.
Thus, the sun was the god _Shamash_, the moon was _Sin_, Jupiter was
_Marduk_, Venus was _Ishtar_, Mars was _Nergal_, Mercury was _Nebo_,
and Saturn was _Ninib_.
In consequence, their priests came to give much of their time to a
study of the movements of the stars. These priests, who were shrewd and
learned men, discovered a great deal, but they kept their knowledge
closely within the circle of their caste. Learning was not for everyone
in those days because the priests posed as magicians able to interpret
dreams, to explain signs, and to foretell the future. This brought
them much revenue; as prophets they were not unmindful of profits.
When we consider that these astrologer-astronomers did not have
telescopes or our other modern instruments, it is marvelous to see how
many of the laws of the heavenly bodies they really did find out for
themselves. Books could be filled, with the story of their discoveries.
For example, they observed that the sun slowly changed the points at
which it rose and set. During certain months, the place of sunrise
traveled northward, and at the same time the sun rose higher in the
sky, and at noon was more nearly overhead. At this time, the days were
also longer, because the sun was above the horizon more of the time,
and then it was summer. During certain other months, the sun traveled
south again, and all these conditions were reversed; the days grew
shorter and shorter, and it was winter. This is, of course, exactly
what the sun appears to do here and now, and we may observe it for
ourselves. But these Babylonian priests were the first to study these
phenomena and accomplish something by applying their reasoning powers
to the facts that presented themselves. They took the time which was
consumed in this motion from the furthest north to the furthest south
and return, and from that worked out their year.
In order to calculate time, they next devised the zodiac, a sort of
belt encircling the heavens and showing the course of the sun, and the
location of twelve constellations, or groups of stars, through which
he would be seen to pass if his light did not blot out theirs. They
divided the region of these twelve constellations into the same number
of equal parts; consequently, the sun passing from any given point
around the heavens to the same point, occupied in so doing an amount of
time that was arbitrarily divided into twelfths.
But they also devised another twelve-part division of the year. They
noticed that the moon went through her phases, from full moon to full
moon in about thirty days. So one moon, or one month, corresponded with
the passage of the sun through one "sign" of the zodiac. Our own word
"month" might have been written "moonth," since that is its meaning.
That gave them a year of twelve months, each month having thirty days,
or three hundred and sixty days in all.
Then from the seven heavenly bodies which they had identified with
seven great gods, they got the idea of a week of seven days, one day
for the special worship of each god and named for him.
In like manner, they divided the day and the night each into twelve
hours; and the hour into sixty minutes and these again into sixty
seconds. The choice of "sixty" was not a chance shot or accident;
it was carefully selected for practical reasons since these old
astronomers were wise and level-headed men. No lower number can be
divided by so many other numbers as can sixty. Just look at your
watch for a moment and notice how simply and naturally the minutes,
divided into fives, fit into place between the figures for the hours,
and, because sixty divides evenly by fifteen and thirty, we have
quarter-hours and half-hours.
Therefore, we should realize, with a bit of gratitude, that we owe
these divisions of time, of which we still make use, to the ancient
magician-priests of Babylon and Chaldea, thousands and thousands of
years ago.
In doing all this, these early scientists developed at the same time
an elaborate system of so-called "magic" by which they pretended to
foretell future events and the destinies of men born on certain days.
This was an important part of their priestcraft, and probably it was
not the least profitable part. In fact, the priests called themselves
_magi_, meaning "wise men" in their language, and our word "magic" is
derived from "magi."
This _magic_, or prophetic study of the stars, we call _astrology_
to distinguish it from the true science of _astronomy_. But mingled
with it all, these priests possessed a wonderful amount of genuine
scientific knowledge. Their year of three hundred and sixty days
was, of course, five days too short, as they presently found out
for themselves. In six years, the difference would amount to thirty
days, which was exactly the length of one of their months. So they
corrected the calendar very easily by doubling the month Adar once in
six years. Thus, every sixth year contained thirteen months instead
of twelve; that was the origin of the leap-year principle which we
still use, although more accurately. It can be seen that, with all
their superstition and their befooling of other people, the priests
themselves were by no means ignorant; they were really keen observers.
This calendar, by which we still measure the years and the seasons, is
so interesting a thing that it is worth while to pause for a moment in
our story in order to trace out its later development. The Babylonian
calendar remained practically the same up to the time of Julius Caesar,
only a few years before the Christian Epoch. The names of the months
had naturally been changed into the Latin language; and the Romans,
instead of doubling a whole month, had come to add the extra five days
to several months, one day to each. That is the reason for some of our
months having thirty-one days.
When Caesar was Dictator of Rome, it had become known that the year
of exactly 365 days was still a little too short. It should have been
365¼. So Caesar in reforming the calendar, provided that the first,
third, fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh months should be given
thirty-one days each, and that the others should have thirty days,
except in the case of February which should have its thirtieth day
only once in four years. A little later, his successor, the Emperor
Augustus, after whom the month of August is named, decided that _his_
month must be as long as July, which was Julius Caesar's month.
Therefore, he stole a day from February and added one to August; then
he changed the following months by making September and November
thirty-day months and giving thirty-one days to October and December.
The Julian calendar, with these changes by Augustus, remained in use
until the year A. D. 1582, nearly a century after the discovery of
America. Then it was learned that the average year of 365¼ days was
still not exactly right according to the motion of the earth around the
sun. The exact time is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds,
being 11 minutes and 14 seconds less than 365¼ days. When, therefore,
we add a day to the year every four years, as Caesar commanded, we
are really adding too much. This excess was corrected by Pope Gregory
XII in 1582, when he changed the calendar so that the last year of a
century should be a leap-year only when its number could be divided
evenly by 400. Thus, 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap-years,
though the year 2000 will be. This new calendar, which is the one
now generally in use in most of the world, is known as the Gregorian
calendar.
Thus the plan and principle of the calendar, as well as our smaller
divisions of time, in spite of the small changes by Caesar and
Gregory, have remained from the Babylonian days down to the present;
and we have done nothing to their system in all these thousands of
years, except, incidentally to correct it.
Only once in history have the measures of the ancient calendar been
set aside. That was in France at the time of the Revolution, when the
French people, in their passionate hatred of all the traditional things
that reminded them of their past sufferings, invented a new calendar,
in which they changed the names of months and days, and counted the
years from 1792, the first of their liberty. They also abolished all
Sundays and religious festivals, and divided the day into ten hours.
This played havoc with time-keeping, and caused great confusion.
Watches and clocks were made with one circle of numbers for the new
hours, and another, within, on which were shown the old hours which
people could understand. But this complication lasted only a few years,
for the traditional system was soon restored.
To return again to the era of the first calendar. While the wise men
of Mesopotamia were engaged in mingling science and mystery, another
civilization, the Egyptian, was developing upon the banks of the Nile
and passing through much of the same stages. In due course the Persians
conquered both Mesopotamia and Egypt and absorbed their knowledge.
Still later the wonderful Greek nation combined astronomy with
mathematics in a way which makes us wonder to this day. This is the way
in which civilization has grown. Race after race, during century after
century has added its new knowledge and discoveries to that which has
been learned before. It is interesting to note that the astronomy of
the Babylonians appears to have been paralleled independently by other
ancient civilizations between which there was no apparent possibility
of intercourse. The Chinese in the East and the Aztecs of Mexico, on
the other side of the world, invented practically the same astronomical
instruments as the Babylonians and made similar discoveries. All
methods of indicating time have been steps upon the long road which has
led to the making of modern timepieces.
The progressive Greeks did not permit knowledge to be monopolized
by the priesthood and probably their common people knew more about
the stars than most of the population of America do to this day.
Sailors possessed no compasses, but they voyaged very skilfully
with the guidance of the stars, while farmers, lacking our modern
weather-reports and crop-bulletins, learned to govern their planting
and harvesting by the positions of the heavenly bodies.
In one sense, this is time-telling and in another it is not, but our
ideas of time and astronomy have always been so closely associated that
it is hard to think of one apart from the other. This is because the
movements of the earth, which produce night and day and the changes
of the seasons, are our supreme court of time, our final standard for
its measurement. And since we cannot see the earth move, we judge of
its motion by the apparent movement of the heavenly bodies, just as we
realize the movement of a train by watching the landscape rush past us
as we go.
Some of the great Greek scientists, by the way, had even learned to
foretell eclipses of the sun. According to Herodotus the one which
occurred on May 28th, in the year 585 B. C., was predicted by Thales
of Miletus, one of the famous "Seven Wise Men." This event was also
celebrated because of another interesting association; it stopped a
battle between the armies of the Medes and the Lydians. Perhaps we can
guess at what happened. Undoubtedly the eclipse was interpreted by the
armies as a sign of divine anger, for the ancients identified many
of the forces and objects of nature as gods, and Phoebus Apollo, who
it was believed daily drove his flaming chariot across the sky, was
the great divinity of the sun. Furthermore, these gods were very apt
to meddle with happenings upon the earth, particularly with wars, as
anyone who has read the "Iliad" will recall.
[Illustration: TIME TELLING IN THE "LAND BETWEEN THE RIVERS"
_The Chaldean priests in ancient Mesopotamia told time by the stars,
thus combining science with religion._]
Imagine, then, the two armies about to go to battle when suddenly
something appeared to go wrong with the sun. There to their amazement,
in a cloudless sky, a dimming shadow touched the edge of the sun's
shining disk and began slowly to blot it out. The warriors forgot to
fight each other and stared in terror at the sky. The sun dwindled to
a crescent; a weird twilight fell upon the earth. Finally, the last
thread of brightness disappeared leaving a dull circle in the sky,
surrounded by faint bands of light. The gloom of night fell upon the
ground. Birds and animals went to their rest.
No further evidence was needed by the superstitious and frightened
soldiers. It must be true that Phoebus Apollo was grievously angered,
and they forthwith laid down their arms. The sun god, of course, soon
showed his approval of this action by coming back into the sky.
This is only one of many tales which might be told to show the state of
superstition in those days. Learning, then, was confined to the few,
and in many instances was used to mystify or terrorize the mass of the
people and thus keep them submissive. At best, new ideas were slow to
grow or to be believed.
For example, Pythagorus, the great Greek philosopher of the sixth
century B. C., believed the earth to be a globe, but it was not
until Columbus discovered America—twenty centuries later—that people
generally began to know that it was not flat. Even in these modern
days of the public school, the press, the telephone, the telegraph,
the wireless and other means for the wide-spread distribution of
knowledge, how slowly does truth find its way to acceptance! To this
day, superstition is by no means dead.
Even Mark Twain, who scoffed at superstition all his life, often said
that, as he came into the world with Halley's Comet, in the year 1835,
so he expected to die in 1910, the year of the comet's next appearance.
Strangely enough, his half-jesting prophecy was fulfilled, for he
really did die in that year.
Astronomers to-day can figure out in advance what is to happen in the
heavens with an exactness which would have seemed magical in olden
times, and is hardly less astonishing even now. Their power is largely
due to improved scientific instruments, proficiency in mathematics and
greater accuracy in the measurement of time. Not only is the date of an
eclipse of the sun now known in advance, but so also is the exact path
of the shadow across the world, and the instant of its appearance in
any given place.
We now have glanced briefly at a few of the features of early
humanity's dependence upon the clocks of nature and the way in which
they influenced its manner of life. We still depend upon these great
primeval timepieces and we do it for the most part unconsciously, for
our master clocks must still be set by the motion of the heavenly
bodies.
That motion, which now we know to be really the revolution of our
earth, is still the legislator and supreme court of time. But we
have learned to make and carry everywhere a wonderful machine, whose
revolving wheels and pointing hands keep tryst with the stars in the
heavens and move to the rhythm of wheeling worlds. And so familiar is
this talisman of man's making, that we forget to look beyond it or
think of time at all save as the position of the hands upon the dial.
We carry with us carelessly a toy which tells tales upon the solar
system—our watch is a pocket universe.
CHAPTER THREE
_How Man Began to Model After Nature_
We now have reached a point far ahead of our story and must take a
backward step. We have been seeing man as a mere observer of nature;
but man doesn't stop with nature as he finds it—his man-brain drives
him forward; he must make improvements of his own. Animals may live
and die and leave no trace save their bones, which for the most part
soon disappear, but man always leaves traces behind him. He has always
interfered with nature, or rather has modeled after nature, seeing
in her work the revelations of principles and laws that he might
utilize in varying ways for his own benefit and progress. Our material
civilization is built up from the accumulated results of all this study
and control of nature by hundreds of millions of busy brains and hands,
through tens of thousands of years.
Here we are, then, living, in a sense on the top of the ages of human
history, like the dwellers on a coral island. Hundreds of generations
have toiled to raise the vast structure for us, like the little coral
"polyps" which build their own lives into the mass, yet we take it all
as a matter of course and rarely give a thought to the marvelous ways
by which it has come about. You may have just glanced at your watch. To
you, perhaps, a watch has always seemed merely a small mechanism which
was bought in a store. That is true, and yet—remember this—the first
manufacturer who had a hand in producing that watch for you, may have
been a caveman.
In order to appreciate this development, let us return, therefore, for
another rapid view of prehistoric times; life in its crudest form—one
day much like another—a scanty population, huddled in little groups in
places naturally sheltered—the simplest physical needs to be provided
for—little thought of the past or care for the future—time-reckoning
reduced to the single thought of appointment—no reason for measuring
intervals—in these and other respects antiquity presented the greatest
possible contrast to our complicated modern life.
The long-armed man of our first chapter noticed that as the sun moved,
the shadows of the cliff also moved, as did all other shadows. As
he formed habits of regularity, it was natural for him to perform a
certain daily act when, perhaps, the shadow of a certain tree touched
upon a certain stone. This would be a _natural_ sun-dial.
But a thinner, sharper shadow would be easier to observe; suppose,
therefore, that some successor to the long-armed man set up a pole
in some open space and laid a stone to mark the spot where the
shadow fell when the sun was highest in the heavens. That would be an
_artificial_ sun-dial—_a device deliberately planned to accomplish a
certain purpose_. The man who first took such a step was probably the
first manufacturer who had a hand in supplying you with your watch. The
shaggy mammoth, the terrible saber-tooth tiger and the eohippus, the
small ancestor of our modern horse, must have been familiar sights when
time-recording at the hands of some rude, unconscious inventor thus
began the long story of its development.
One stone reached by the moving shadow would mark only one point of
time each day. Why not place two stones, three stones, or even more and
get more markings? Such a procedure would be more useful because it
would indicate the time of other happenings in the course of the day.
The sun would pass across the skies and the shadow must travel around
the pole. What more natural than to place the stones in a circle and
get a series of these markings?
Of course, as the ages passed, life became more complex—not complex as
we would consider it to-day, but, as compared with its rude beginnings.
New habits were formed, new needs developed, new activities were
undertaken at different periods.
Here, then, was the sprouting of modern civilization—the beginning
of that specializing of each man in his own particular direction
that has carried the world to its present high state of expertness
in so many fields. Slowly steadily, and inevitably this principle of
specialization has been developed. With the increase of laws, for
example, certain men came to give them special study and then to
sell their knowledge and skill to other men who had no opportunity
for such study. In course of time, the aggregation of laws became so
great that these lawyers were forced to specialize among themselves;
to-day, therefore, we find a number of classes of law specialists. The
same thing is true of doctors who have limited their practise until
we find those who treat the eye only, or the lungs, the stomach, or
the teeth. Even the treatment of the teeth has been subdivided, some
dentists limiting themselves to extraction and some of them even to the
treatment of a single disease of the gums.
Engineering, too, has branched like a tree and the branches have
branched again and yet again. Electrical engineering has come to be
divided into so many departments that telephone companies employ
specialists in many branches of the engineering profession.
We find the same conditions in any field of thought or activity—all
commercial and industrial life is divided and subdivided; labor is
specialized; writing is specialized; teaching is specialized; even
warfare has become a contest between many kinds of trained specialists,
each employing the tools of his trade; and every man's outlook
upon life is directed chiefly toward the particular corner of the
particular field that he has fitted himself to occupy.
The first step toward this complex condition of the modern world was
taken when each man stopped getting his own food, making his own
weapons, and providing for all his individual wants without dependence
upon others. When he learned to exchange that which he could best
produce for that which some other man had learned to make better than
he, the human race unconsciously turned away from the status of the
birds and the beasts and began the long, slow upward climb that history
records.
It was, then, through trade, barter and exchange that man began
to acquire the manners of civilized life. Trade itself became a
specialized activity, and dealers who did nothing but buy and sell, but
themselves produced no material goods, found that a special calling
was rightfully theirs. The modern merchant is the heir of one of the
first "specialists" in human activity, and the misunderstood work of
the so-called "middleman" is one of the bases of modern civilization—a
necessary and honorable calling.
[Illustration: THE FIRST RECORDED SUN DIAL
_The "Dial of Ahaz" was probably a flight of curving steps upon which a
beam of sunlight fell. See Isaiah, xxxviii._]
Civilization is a thing of the spirit, but it has the support of
material things and it has been truly said that the degree of a
people's civilization can be measured by the multiplicity of its needs.
The savage is content with food, shelter and a covering for his body,
but every step in civilization's progress has a more and more complex
material accompaniment, and these interwoven relationships of
modern life in which the question of time is a most important factor
can only be sustained through the use of accurate time-measure. In
other words, modern civilization leans upon the watch.
But here again we have run somewhat ahead of our story which, as a
matter of fact, had only reached the point of primitive sun-dials.
But this anticipation will be excused because of the importance of
emphasizing that the growing interdependence of human relations had
made it necessary to take into account the convenience of a greater
and greater number of people, and this involved closer and closer
time-recording in smaller divisions of time by more exact methods.
The sun-dial underwent so many changes that a volume would be needed
to describe them all. For example, it was found that the shadow of an
upright stick or stone varied from day to day, because, as we have
already noticed, the sun rises farther north in summer in the northern
hemisphere than it does in winter. So the mark for a certain hour would
change as the season changed, and the dial would not indicate time
accurately.
Berosus, a Chaldean historian and priest of Bel, or Baal, a god of the
old Babylonian, lived about the year 250 B. C., and hit upon a very
ingenious way of solving this difficulty. He made the dial hollow like
the inside of a bowl. Into this the shadow was cast by a little round
ball or bead at the end of a pointer that stood horizontally out over
the bowl.
Now the sky itself is like a great bowl or inverted hemisphere, and,
howsoever the sun moved upon it, the shadow would move in the same way
upon the inside of the bowl or hemisphere. And by drawing lines in the
bowl, similar to the lines of longitude upon the map, the hours could
be correctly measured. The "Hemicycle of Berosus," as it was called,
remained in use for centuries and was the favorite form of sun-dial all
through the classic period of Greece and Rome. Cicero had one at his
villa near Tusculum, and one was found, in 1762, at Pompeii.
But the hemicycle was not easy to make unless it were fairly small,
and, if small, it was not very easy to read. You can see that a shadow
which traveled only a few inches in a whole day would move so slowly
that one could hardly see it go. And the shadow of a round ball is
not a clear sharp-pointed thing like the hand of a watch, whose exact
position can be seen however small it may be. Besides, the ancients
were not very particular about exact timekeeping. They had no trains to
catch, and in their leisurely lives convenience counted for more than
doing things "on the minute." So they still continued using the upright
pointer which the Greeks called the _gnomon_, meaning "the one who
knows."
"Cleopatra's Needle," and other Egyptian obelisks may also have been
used as huge gnomons to cast their shadows upon mammoth dials, for they
were dedicated to the sun. With an object of such great size the shadow
would move rapidly enough to be followed easily by the eye. But of
course its motion would be irregular because of the flat surface of the
dial. The word "dial," by the way, comes from the Latin _dies_ meaning
"day," because it determined the divisions of the day.
Then there was applied the idea of making the shadow move over a hollow
space, such as a walled courtyard, going down one side, across, and up
the other side as the sun went up, across and down the sky. Sometimes
light was used instead of shadow, the place being partially roofed over
and a single beam of light being admitted through a small hole at the
southern end. Men kept track of the motion of this beam as it touched
one point after another during the day.
Do you remember the miracle of the dial of Ahaz, mentioned in the
Bible? Hezekiah the king was sick and despondent, and would not
believe that he could ever recover from his illness or prevail against
his enemies. So the prophet, Isaiah, in an effort to comfort the
royal sufferer, made the shadow return backward ten degrees upon the
dial of Ahaz, as a sign from heaven that his prophecy of the king's
future recovery was true. You will find the story in Isaiah, Chapter
thirty-eight.
This dial of Ahaz was probably a curved flight of steps rising like the
side of a huge bowl at one end of the palace courtyard, with either a
shadow cast by a pointer overhead or a beam of light admitted through
an opening. It can be seen that this and similar great dials were
applications of the hemicycle idea on a large scale.
According to our chronology, the dial of Ahaz must have been built
during the eighth century, B. C. Although the sun-dial period was, of
course, many hundreds of years older than this, yet the story of this
Hebrew king and prophet is the first authentic reference to a sun-dial
which has been discovered.
However, the final improvement of the dial was made when it was
discovered that by slanting the pointer, or gnomon, exactly toward
the north pole of the sky—the point where the north star appears at
night—the sun's shadow could be cast upon a flat surface with accurate
results in indicating time.
This may sound simple, but if you will look at a sun-dial such as may
still be found in gardens, you will see that the lines of the hours
and minutes are laid out on certain carefully calculated angles; you
will realize that people had to acquire considerable knowledge before
they were capable of making such calculations. The whole subject of
dial-making is so complicated that, in 1612, there was published a big
book of eight hundred pages on the subject.
The angles of the lines of the sun-dial must be different for different
latitudes. It took that strong-arm race of ancient times, the Romans,
a hundred years to learn this fact. The Romans, at this time, were
developing their civilization from the shoulders downward, while
the Greeks and some of the Greek colonies developed theirs from the
shoulders upward. Rome was a burly power, with powerful military
muscles. Whatever it wanted it went out and took at the point of the
sword, as some nations have endeavored to do in latter days. Thus, the
city of Rome became a vast storehouse of miscellaneous loot—the fruit
of other men's brains and hands.
Some conqueror of that day took back with him a sun-dial from the Greek
colony of Sicily. This was set up in Rome, where nobody realized that
even the power of Rome's armies was not able to transplant the angle of
the sun as it shone upon Sicily far to the southward. It was nearly one
hundred years before these self-satisfied robbers found that they had
been getting the wrong time-record from the stolen instrument. Thus,
the original owners had a form of belated revenge, could they but have
known it.
One of the largest of all the sun-dials was the one set up by the Roman
Emperor Augustus when he returned from his Egyptian wars bringing
with him an obelisk not unlike the one which now stands near the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, New York City. If you can
imagine this Egyptian obelisk, with its strange hieroglyphic characters
upon its four sides, surrounded by a great dial with the figures of the
hours marked upon its surface, you will get an idea of the size of this
huge timepiece. However, it was probably more picturesque than valuable
as a time-keeper.
There is an important difference between clocks and sun-dials, aside
from the self-evident one of the difference in their construction.
Clock-time is based on what is called "mean time." If we study the
almanac table of times of sunrises and sunsets, and count the number
of hours from sunrise of one day to sunrise of the next, we find it is
rarely exactly twenty-four hours, but usually a few minutes more or
less, while the average for the whole year is twenty-four hours. The
clock is constructed to keep uniform time based on this average length
of day.
The sun-dial time marks "apparent time," the actual varying length of
each day. The sun-dial time, therefore, is nearly always some minutes
ahead or behind that of a clock, the greatest discrepancy being about
sixteen minutes for a few days in November. There are, however, four
days in the year when the clock and the sun-dial agree perfectly in the
time they indicate. These days are April 15th, June 15th, September
1st, and December 24th.
When in the eighteenth century clocks and watches began to come into
wide-spread use sun-dials fell into neglect, except as an appropriate
bit of ornament in gardens. At Castletown, in the Isle of Man, is a
remarkable sun-dial with thirteen faces, dating from 1720.
It was usual to place on sun-dials appropriate mottoes expressing a
sentiment exciting inspiration or giving a warning to better living.
A dial that used to be at Paul's Cross, London, bore an inscription
in Latin, which translated means, "I count none but the sunny hours."
In an old sweet-scented garden in Sussex was a sun-dial with a plate
bearing four mottoes, each for its own season: "After darkness, light;"
"Alas, how swift;" "I wait whilst I move;" "So passes life." Sometimes
short familiar proverbs were used like: "All things do wax and wane;"
"The longest day must end;" "Make hay while the sun shines."
It is told of Lord Bacon, that, without intending to do so, he
furnished the motto borne by a dial that stood in the old Temple
Gardens in London. A young student was sent to him for a suggestion
for the motto of the dial, then being built. His lordship was busy
at work in his rooms when the messenger humbly and respectfully made
his request. There was no answer. A second request met with equally
oppressive silence and seeming ignorance of even the existence of
the speaker. At last, when the petitioner ventured a third attack on
the attention of the venerable chancellor, Bacon looked up and said
sharply: "_Sirrah, be gone about your business_." "A thousand thanks,
my lord," was the unexpected reply, "The very thing for the dial!
Nothing could be better."
We see that the principle of the sun-dial has been recognized and
utilized for many centuries; indeed, we still find sun-dials placed
in gardens and parks although we rarely take the trouble to look to
them for the time. Like the dinosaur and the saber-toothed tiger,
they have had their day. They have been forced to give way to devices
that overcame some of their objections; therefore we must not linger
too long upon what is, after all, a closed chapter in the history of
time-recording.
CHAPTER FOUR
_Telling Time by the Water-Thief_
Now we must take another backward step of thousands of years. In
considering the subject of time-recording, it seems necessary to wear
a pair of mental seven-league boots, for we must often pass back and
forth over great periods at single strides. While men were still
improving the sun-dial, its disadvantages were already recognized and
search was being made for some other means of telling time.
Suppose, for example, that one had only a sun-dial about the house; how
would one be able to tell time after sunset or on a dark day? How would
one know the hour if he were surrounded by tall buildings or a thick
growth of trees? And it might be very necessary to tell time under any
of these conditions.
Then, again, merely as a question of accuracy, the sun-dial was
not always reliable. It would get badly out of the way if used
by travelers, since different markings were needed for different
latitudes. While on shipboard the motion of the waves would cause the
shadow to swing around in the most bewildering manner. Even under ideal
conditions it was never absolutely exact, because the apparent motion
of our steady-gaited old sun is not quite as dependable as most of us
imagine.
Astronomers find that they must allow for what they call "equation of
time" in order to make their calculations come out true. The question
need not be discussed at this point, but it can be seen that, as
humanity left its earliest care-free days and began to get busy, and
hurried and anxious over its affairs, it came to feel that after all
the sun-dial was not altogether sufficient for its needs.
For this reason we are now taking a third big backward step, returning,
this time, not to the caveman but to ancient Babylon and Egypt,
probably not less than twenty-seven hundred years ago and possibly much
longer. In this way we meet the _clepsydra_.
The clepsydra was an interesting instrument, and it had an interesting
name, which meant the "thief of water" and came from two Greek
words meaning "thief" and "water"; you can trace this in our words
"kleptomaniac" and "hydrant." We shall now examine a timepiece that was
much more nearly a machine than was the simple shade-casting sun-dial.
The original idea was simple enough. At first, it was merely that of a
vessel of water, having a small hole in the bottom, so that the liquid
dripped out drop by drop. As the level within the jar was lowered, it
showed the time upon a scale. Thus, if the hole were so small and the
vessel were so large that it would require twenty-four hours for the
water to drip away at an absolutely steady rate, it may be seen that
the side of the vessel might easily have been marked with twenty-four
divisions to indicate the hours. It may also be seen that the water
would drip as rapidly at night or in shadow as in sunlight. And the
clepsydra could be used indoors, which the sun-dial could not, although
it required attention in that it must be regularly refilled and the
orifice must always be kept completely open, because the slightest
stoppage would retard the rate of dripping and the "clock" would run
slow.
The sun, which, with the other heavenly bodies, had therefore been the
sole reliance of the human race in its time-reckoning could now be
ignored and the would-be timekeeper called to his aid another mighty
servant from the forces of nature—that of gravitation.
The most interesting human fact, however, about the clepsydra is that
it involved an entirely different conception of the marking of time.
Now it was not so much a question of _when_ as of _how long_. A good
sun-dial set in a proper position would always indicate three o'clock
when it _was_ three o'clock, but the clepsydra might do no such thing.
It would merely show how many hours had elapsed since last it was
filled, and the steady drip, drip, drip of the escaping water could—and
did—lower the surface quite as evenly at one time of day as at another.
We have already seen that the first purpose in marking time was merely
for making appointments, but the clepsydra shows that, with its
invention, mankind had already made some progress toward a new point
of view. One important factor in this change was the very practical
need of telling time at night, in stormy weather, or indoors, where the
sun-dial could not be used. The clepsydra, on the other hand, worked
equally well at any hour or place, and in all sorts of weather.
Nevertheless, it, too, proved to have certain faults. After a time,
people noticed the interesting fact that water ran faster from a full
vessel than from one which was nearly empty; this was, of course,
because of the greater pressure. Since such a variation interfered with
calculations, they hit upon the idea of a double vessel; the larger one
below containing a float which rose as the vessel filled, thus marking
the hours upon the scale, and the smaller one above, the one from
which the water dripped, being kept constantly filled to the point of
overflow.
This improved form of clepsydra opened a field of fascinating
possibilities in time-recording—_it gave the chance to make use of a
machine_. There is, perhaps, no more interesting point in studying
human development than to see the steady, inevitable way in which
mankind from its cave-dwelling days has tended toward machinery.
Roughly, this progress may be characterized as of three stages.
First. Primitive man—an upright-standing animal, naked, unarmed,
weak as compared with some creatures, slow as compared with others,
clumsy as compared with still others—a creature with many physical
disadvantages, but with the best brain in the animal kingdom.
Second. The tool-using man, who had begun to grasp weapons and to
fashion implements, thus supplementing his natural abilities by
artificial means.
Third. The machine-making man, who has fashioned to himself a
mechanical "body" of incredible powers—that is to say, he has learned
to intensify his own powers through artificial means which he has
invented, as when he made the telescope to give himself greater vision;
he has made inventions by means of which he can outrun the antelopes,
outfly the birds, outswim the fishes, outgaze the eagles, and overmatch
the elephants in sheer physical force—he can turn night into day, can
send his voice across the continent, can strike crushing blows at a
distance of many miles and can carry the movements of the stars in his
pocket. Some phases of this third stage were foreshadowed when man
first applied wheels and pulleys to his clepsydra.
Here, then, was water steadily raised or lowered by means of uniform
dropping; here was a float whose motion was controlled by that of the
water; here, in fact, was water-power with a means for applying it.
Attach a cord to the float, cause it to turn a wheel by use of the
pulley-principle, and the motion of the wheel would indicate the time.
Still better, rig up a turning-pointer, increase its speed through the
use of toothed gear-wheels, place it in front of a stationary disk
divided to indicate the hours, and now the apparatus looked not unlike
a modern clock. Or attach a bell and let it be caused to ring at a
certain point in the motion—what was that but an alarm-clock? Ctesibus
of Alexandra was the one who is believed first to have applied the
toothed wheels to the clepsydra and this was about 140 B. C.
[Illustration]
Clepsydrae were expensive of course; accurate mechanical work was
never cheap until modern times. Cunning craftsmen spent their time
upon costly decorations, and these water-clocks became triumphs of the
jeweler's art, a gift for kings. Therefore, like the sun-dial, they
drifted into Rome—that vast maelstrom of the ancient world. Imagine a
great walled city of low flat-roofed buildings, with fronts and porches
of great columns, a town mostly of stone and much of it of marble,
gleaming white under the bright Italian sun, the streets thronged with
men in tunics and togas and here and there some person of importance
driving by, standing erect in his chariot drawn by four horses
harnessed abreast. And statues everywhere, in the streets and about the
buildings and in cool courtyards and gardens among green leaves. The
ancients thought of sculpture as an outdoor thing, and where we have
one statue in the streets or public places of our cities, they had a
hundred. We treasure the remains of them as artistic wonders in our
museums, but they put them indoors and out as common ornaments, and
lived among them.
[Illustration]
Presently we hear of the clepsydra being used in Roman law courts
by command of Pompey, to limit the time of speakers. "This," says
one writer of the day, "was to prevent babblings, that such as spoke
ought to be brief in their speeches." It is not difficult to picture
some pompous and tiresome togaed advocate, rolling out sonorous Latin
syllables as he cites precedents and builds up arguments, while an
unseen dropping checks the time against him, and to hear his indignant
surprise—and the chuckles of his auditors—when the relentless
water-clock cuts him short in the middle of some period. Martial, the
Latin poet, referring to a tiresome speaker who repeatedly moistened
his throat from a glass of water during the lengthy speech, suggested
that it would be an equal relief to him and to his audience, if he were
to drink from the clepsydra. But Roman lawyers were not guileless, and
sometimes, so we are told, they tampered with the mechanical regulation
or else introduced muddy water, which would run out more slowly.
This suggests one of the difficulties of the clepsydra. Still more
serious was the fact that it would freeze on frosty nights. There were
no Pearys among the ancient Romans; polar exploration interested them
not at all; but they did spread their conquests into regions of colder
weather—as when Julius Caesar mentions using the clepsydra to regulate
the length of the night-watches in Britain. His keen mind noted by this
means that the summer nights in Britain were shorter than those at
Rome, a fact now known to be due to difference of latitude.
[Illustration: THE CLEPSYDRA, OR WATER CLOCK
_The Clepsydra, one of the earliest time-telling devices, was used
in Roman law courts to limit the time of speakers and "to prevent
babbling."_]
As late as the ninth century, a clepsydra was regarded as a
princely gift. It is said, that the good caliph, Harun-al-Raschid,
beloved by all readers of the "Arabian Nights," sent one of great
beauty to Charlemagne, the Emperor of the West. Its case was elaborate,
and, at the stroke of each hour, small doors opened to give passage
to cavaliers. After the twelfth hour these cavaliers retired into the
case. The striking apparatus consisted of small balls which dropped
into a resounding basin underneath.
The clepsydra appears to have been used throughout the Middle Ages in
some European countries, and it lingered along in Italy and France down
to the close of the fifteenth century. Some of these water-clocks were
plain tin tubes; some were hollow cups, each with a tiny hole at the
bottom, which were placed in water and gradually filled and sank in a
definite space of time.
When the clepsydra was introduced from Egypt into Greece, and later
into Rome, one was considered enough for each town and was set in the
market-place or some public square. It was carefully guarded by a civic
officer, who religiously filled it at stated times. The nobility of the
town and the wealthy people sent their servants to find out the exact
time, while the poorer inhabitants were informed occasionally by the
sound of the horn which was blown by the attendant of the clepsydra
to denote the hour of changing the guard. This was much in the spirit
of the calls of the watchmen in old England, and later in our New
England, who were, in a way, walking clocks that shouted "Eleven
o'clock and all's well," or whatever might be the hour.
Allowing for the fact that the clepsydra was none too accurate at the
best and that its reservoir must occasionally be refilled, it can be
seen that this early form of timepiece, having played its part, was
ready to step off the stage when a more practical successor should
arrive.
With one of its earliest successors we are familiar.
CHAPTER FIVE
_How Father Time Got His Hour-Glass_
Every now and then one sees a picture of a lean old gentleman, with a
long white beard, flowing robes, and an expression of most misleading
benignity. In spite of his look of kindly good humor, he is none too
popular with the human race and his methods are not always of the
gentlest. In one hand he carries the familiar scythe, and, in the
other, the even more familiar hour-glass. By this we may assume that
he began to be pictured in this way while the hour-glass was still in
common use.
The principle of the hour-glass is so similar to that of the clepsydra,
and its first use was so early, that it is somewhat of a misnomer
to speak of it as a successor. About the only justification that
can be made is that the clepsydra has long disappeared, while the
sand-glass—if not the hour-glass—is still sold in the stores for
such familiar uses as timing the boiling of eggs, the length of
telephone-conversations, and other short-time needs.
Nothing could be much simpler than the hour-glass, in which fine sand
poured through a tiny hole from an upper into a lower compartment. It
had none of the mechanical features of the later clepsydræ; it did
not adjust itself to astronomical laws like the perfected sun-dials;
it merely permitted a steady stream of fine sand to pass through an
opening at a uniform rate of speed, until one of the funnel-shaped
bowls had emptied itself—then waited with entire unconcern until some
one stood it upon its head and caused the sand to run back again.
However, it possessed some very solid advantages of its own. It would
not freeze; it would not spill over; it did not need refilling; it
would run at a steady rate whether the reservoir were full or nearly
empty; it could be made very cheaply, and there was nothing about it to
wear out.
A water-clock might be of considerable size but a sand-clock, since it
required turning, must be kept small, and an _hour-glass_—a size small
enough to carry—became popular, although its use was correspondingly
limited. Thus, it naturally was assigned to Father Time to be carried
before watches were available. A sun-dial simply would not answer this
purpose, since the old gentleman works by night as steadily as by day.
How old is the sand-glass?
We do not know definitely, but it is said to have been invented at
Alexandria about the middle of the third century B.C. That it was known
in ancient Athens is certain, for a Greek bas-relief at the Mattei
Palace in Rome, representing a marriage, shows Morpheus, the god of
dreams, holding an hour-glass. The Athenians used to carry these
timepieces as we do our watches.
Some hour-glasses contained mercury, but sand was an ideal substance,
for, when fine and dry, it flows with an approximately constant speed
whether the quantity is great or small, whereas, liquids descend more
swiftly the greater the pressure above the opening.
Hour-glasses were introduced into churches in the early sixteenth
century when the preachers were famous for their wearisome sermons.
The story is told of one of these long-winded divines who, on a hot
day, had reached his "tenthly" just as the restless congregation were
gladdened to see the last grains of sand fall from the upper bowl.
"Brethren," he remarked; "Let us take another glass," and he reversed
it—"Ahem, as I was saying—" And he went on for another hour.
Other preachers, more merciful, used a half-hour glass and kept within
its limits. Many churches were furnished with ornamental stands to
hold the glass. These timekeepers lingered along in country churches
for many years, but ceased to be in anything like general demand after
about 1650.
For rough purposes of keeping time on board ship, sand-glasses were
employed and it is curious to note that hour and half-hour glasses were
used for this purpose in the British navy as recently as the year 1839.
The very baby of the hour-glass family was a twenty-eight second affair
which assisted in determining the speed of the vessel. The log-line
was divided by knots, at intervals of forty-seven feet, three inches,
and this distance would go into a nautical mile as many times as
twenty-eight seconds would go into an hour. When the line was thrown
overboard the mariner counted the number of knots slipping through his
fingers while his eyes were fixed on the tiny emptying sand-glass, and
in this way so many "knots" an hour denoted the ship's speed in miles.
In the British House of Commons, even at the present time, a two-minute
glass is used in the preliminary to a "division," which is a method
of voting wherein the members leave their seats and go into either
the affirmative or negative lobbies. While the sand is running,
"division-bells" are set in motion in every part of the building to
give members notice that a "division" is at hand.
It was an ancient custom to put an hour-glass, as an emblem that the
sands of life had run out, into coffins at burials.
Another early means of recording time applied the principle of the
consumption of some slow-burning fuel by fire. From remote ages, the
Chinese and Japanese thus used ropes, knotted at regular intervals, or
cylinders of glue and sawdust marked in rings, which slowly smoldered
away. Alfred the Great, that noble English king of the ninth century,
is said to have invented the candle-clock, because of a vow to give
eight hours of the day to acts of religion, eight hours to public
affairs, and eight hours to rest and recreation. He had six tapers
made, each twelve inches long and divided into twelve parts, or inches,
colored alternately black and white. Three of these parts were burned
in one hour, making each inch represent twenty minutes, so that his six
candles, lighted one after the other by his chaplains, would burn for
twenty-four hours.
The Eskimos also, through the long arctic night have watched the
lamp which gives both light and heat to their cold huts of snow. But
all these are no more than crude conveniences, whose irregularity is
evident, and there is likewise no need to do more than call attention
to the effect upon fire in any form, of wind or dampness in the air.
The Roman lamp-clock sheltered from the weather was the best of them
all, and was the only one which long continued in civilized use.
Our chief interest in all such devices comes from the touch of poetry
still remaining in the tradition of the sacred flame which must be kept
forever burning, and in association of life and time with fire, in such
parables as that of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. There is a reminder
of this old time-keeping by fire in all that poetry and philosophy
which tells of hope that still may live or of deeds that maybe done,
"while the lamp holds out to burn."
Thus far, in spite of occasional glimpses of the Middle Ages and of
modern times, we have dealt, for the most part, with earlier ages.
Now our story must leave these behind, and thus passes the ancient
world with its strange pagan civilization which was so human, so wise
and so simple. It is difficult for modern Americans even to imagine
existence in ancient Greece or Rome or in still more ancient Egypt and
Mesopotamia—since the whole attitude toward life was so essentially
different from what it is to-day.
Our debt to the ancients in this one matter of recording time is
typical of that in many others. To them we owe our whole fundamental
system and conception of it from the astronomy by which we measure our
years and our seasons and make our appeal to the final standard of the
stars, down to the arithmetic of our minutes and seconds and the very
names of our months and days.
[Illustration:
Sun Dial Designed and Placed by Sir Isaac Newton in
Cranbury Park, Winchester, England
Pulpit Two-Hour Glass American, 1700-50 in the Essex Institute, Salem,
Mass.
Silver Gilt French Hour Glass Eighteenth Century in the Metropolitan
Museum
TYPES OF THE EARLIEST TIME TELLING DEVICES
_The sun dial is the first ancestor of all time tellers, and the sand
glass was probably the first portable time telling device._]
In the modern application and practical use of all this, on the other
hand, we owe them nothing. They never made a clock or watch, or any
like device which has more than a merely ornamental use to-day. They
gave us the general plan so well that we have never bettered it, but
they left later generations to work out the details. They invented the
second as a division of time but they did not measure by it. They did
not care to try. For them, learning was the natural right and power of
the few, and the gulf between the most that was known by the few
and the little that was known in general, was like the gulf between
great wealth and great poverty among ourselves.
Indeed, in this age of teaching and preaching, when a thought seems to
need only to be born in order to be spread abroad over the world, it
is hard for us even to conceive the instinct by which men kept their
learning like a secret among the initiated and felt no impulse to make
known that which they knew.
Their great men thought and did wonderful things which are now the
common property of us all. And their common folk lived in a fashion
astonishingly primitive by comparison, in an ignorance which certainly
was weakness and may somehow have been bliss.
That world of theirs is gone—the body and the spirit of it alike. And
there remains to us, along with much of their art and their science,
the hour-glass to symbolize that relentless flight of time which they
feared but never tried to save; and the quaint sun-dial in our gardens,
a memory of that worldly-wise old philosophy which counted only the
shining hours.
CHAPTER SIX
_The Clocks Which Named Themselves_
Now the scene changes again, and the story shifts forward over the
interval of a thousand years. As we take up the tale once more, we find
ourselves in another world, amid a life as different from that ancient
life of which we have been speaking as either of them is from our own
life to-day.
The ancient civilization, which may be traced from Rome through Greece,
Babylon and Egypt back to the dim dawn of history, is gone almost
as if it had never been. For there came a period when great hordes
of barbarians defeated the armies, burnt the cities, pillaged and
destroyed, leaving only desolation and ruin behind them. Then followed
hundreds of years of what we call the "Dark Ages,"—ages of ignorance
and violence, when mankind was slowly struggling upwards again and was
forming a new civilization upon the ruins of the old. Therefore, at the
point we have now reached, there are no more white temples and pillared
porticos and sandaled men in white tunic and toga, and marble statues
in green gardens; but everywhere we find sharp roofs and towers, quaint
outlines, and wild color like a child's picture-book.
There are castles with their moats and battlements, and monasteries
with their cloistered arches; there are knights in armor riding, and
lords and ladies gorgeous in strange garments, and monks in their dull
gowns, and the sturdy peasant working in the field; and in the towns,
all among peaked gables and Gothic windows and rough cobbled streets,
a motley crowd of beggar and burgher and courtier, priest and clerk,
doctor and scholar and soldier and merchant and tradesman—an endless
variety of types, and each in the distinctive costume of his calling.
And there are churches everywhere, from the huge cathedral towering
like a forest of carven stone to the humble village chapel or wayside
shrine, their spires all pointing up to heaven in token of the change
that has come upon the life and spirit of the world.
We have come from the height of the classic period suddenly into the
heart of the Middle Ages; and in the dark centuries that lie between,
Christ and His Disciples have come and gone, and the religion of the
Western World has changed; the old gods have perished and the saints
have filled their places. And Rome has died, and Romance has been born.
The center of civilization has shifted to the north and west; from the
old ring of lands around the Mediterranean to the great nations of
modern Europe. Italy has become a jealous group of independent cities,
great in art and commerce, but in little else. Germany is much the
same, except for the lack of some few score centuries of tradition.
France and Spain are already great and growing. William the Conqueror
has fought and ruled and died, and the "Merry England" of song and
story has grown up out of the fusion of Saxon and Norman. Chivalry and
the Crusades, the times of _Ivanhoe_ and _The Talisman_, are as fresh
as yesterday.
And by green hedgerows and hospitable inns, Chaucer's Pilgrims are
plodding onward toward the sound of Canterbury's bells. For here is the
point of all our seeking—that there are clocks now in the monasteries
and in the Cathedral towers. There is just one curious link of likeness
between the Middle Ages and the remoter past; as it was at first at
Babylon, so now in the fourteenth century the priesthood holds almost a
monopoly of science and of learning.
Thus, although the sun-dial, clepsydra and sand-glass are still much
used, we find ourselves at last in the time and lands of _clocks_. The
very sound of the word "clock" gives a clue to its origin. It suggests
the striking of the hour upon some bell. The French called the word
_cloche_ and the Saxons _clugga_, and both of these originally meant a
bell.
If you will put yourself back in the picture at the beginning of the
chapter, you will find yourself in a realm of sounding, pealing,
chiming bells with the hours of prayer throughout the day, from
matins to angelus, rung out from the belfries, and with frequent
deep-toned strikings of the hour. Not even a blind man could have
remained unconscious of the passage of the hours under such conditions,
and time, in a sense, became more a possession of democracy although
timepieces themselves were still the mark of special privilege.
Life also was beginning to hurry just a little. Very deliberate,
we should call it in comparison with the mad rush of the twentieth
century, and yet it began to show its growing complexity in that
humanity was becoming more definitely organized and men were forced
to depend more and more upon each other. In all of this, there was a
slightly growing sense of the things that were to be, just as the water
for some miles above Niagara begins to hasten its course under the
influence of the mighty cataract over which it will at last go madly
plunging.
Herein occurs another of those baffling questions, like the old-time
puzzler as to whether the hen first came from the egg or the egg from
the hen. One cannot help wondering to what extent the increasing
accuracy of the broadening knowledge of time-keeping was the _result_
of our complicated modern life and to what extent it was the _cause_.
Certainly we cannot conceive of present-day affairs as being conducted
save in the light of moving hands and figures upon a dial.
From the Middle Ages, then, we get our word for clock and, which is
more important, we begin to get some crude application of its modern
mechanical principles. They were wonderfully skilful, those medieval
workmen, considering the means at their disposal, and the ingenuity
of some of their clocks is still a delight, but, perhaps, for better
understanding of the story, we should stop for a minute to inquire
exactly what a clock means from the mechanical point of view.
A clock is a machine for keeping time. And for this there are four
essentials, without any one of which there would be no clock. First,
there must be a motive power to make it run; second, there must be a
means of transmitting this power; third, there must be a regulating
device to make the mechanism move steadily and slowly, and keep the
motive power from running down too quickly; and, fourth, there must be
some device to mark the time and make it known.
In a typical modern clock the power comes from the pull of a weight or
the pressure of a spring—although clocks may, of course, be operated by
electricity or compressed air or some other means; also, the regulator
is what is known as the "escapement" and the recording device consists
of the hands, the dial, and the striking mechanism. Having stated
this, let us return to the past and see if we can determine how these
principles came to be applied.
This is not altogether easy. Our forefathers were less particular than
we over such trifling questions as names and spelling—even the learned
Shakespeare, long afterward, used several different spellings of his
own name. Thus, when we see in the records of the period the name of
"clock" or "horologe" we cannot tell with certainty what type is meant,
since "horologe" meant simply a device for keeping time; it might have
been applied equally well to a clock, clepsydra, an hour-glass, or even
a sun-dial.
"It is quite possible," writes M. Gubelin Breitschmidt, the younger,
an eminent horologist of Lucerne, Switzerland, "that a large number of
the technical inventions of antiquity were lost during the migrations
of the barbarians and under the chaotic conditions prevailing during
the first thousand years of Christianity, but the most perfect
surviving instrument for measuring time was the water-clock, known as
the clepsydra, which was able to maintain its supremacy long after
the appearance of the wholly mechanical clock, just as the beautiful
manuscripts of the artist monks and laymen were favored by the cultured
classes long after the invention of movable types for printing.
"The spread of Christianity throughout Europe caused the foundation of
many religious communities, and the severe rules by which they were
governed—fixing the hours of prayer, labor, and refreshment—forced
their members to seek instruments by which to measure time. In the year
605, a bull of Pope Sabinianus decreed that all bells be rung seven
times in the twenty-four hours, at fixed moments and regularly, and
these fixed times became known as the seven canonical hours. The sound
of the bells penetrated and came to regulate not only the life of the
religious bodies but also that of the secular people who lived outside
the walls of the monasteries. Oil-lamps, candles, hour-glasses, prayers
and—for those who had the means of buying them—clepsydræ served as
chronometers for the brotherhoods; so that one can easily imagine that
many a monk sought to improve these instruments. But as yet, no one had
found means to regulate the wheel-system of a movement. In the best
instruments of this period, water supplied the motive power and served
as well to regulate the action."
There is a general belief that Gerbert, the monk, who was the most
accomplished scholar of his age, and who later became Pope Sylvester
II, was the one who first took the important step of producing a real
clock, and that this occurred near the close of the tenth century—or
to be more exact, about 990 A. D. This period was one of densest
superstition, and expectancy of the end of the world was in the air,
since many people had fixed upon the year 1000 A. D. as the date of
that cataclysmic event.
Authorities of the Church and of the state were not very partial
to invention and research, their attention being fixed largely
upon theological, political, or military affairs; but, of course,
inquiring and constructive minds were still to be found; even without
encouragement these tended to follow the impulse of their natures.
[Illustration: GALILEO DISCOVERING THE PRINCIPLE OF THE PENDULUM
_As a youth of seventeen Galileo watched a swinging lamp, in the
Cathedral of Pisa, timed it by his pulse, and discovered the principle
upon which pendulum clocks are built._]
It is to the monks in their cloisters that we chiefly owe the
preservation of learning through the "dark ages," and from the monks,
for the most part, came such progress of science and invention as was
made. If Gerbert, the monk, after patient tinkering with wheels and
weights in his stone-walled workshop, really achieved some form of the
clock-action as we know it, he was one of the great benefactors of the
human race. Still, it is not impossible that his device may only have
been a more remarkable application of the clepsydra principle.
Whatever it was, it seems to have startled the authorities, for they
are said to have accused him of having practiced sorcery through league
with the devil, and to have banished him for a time from France. His
age appears to have had a vast respect for the intellectual powers of
his Satanic Majesty. Anything which was too ingenious or scientific to
be understood without an uncomfortable degree of mental application was
very apt to be ascribed to diabolic inspiration and thus found unfit
for use in "Christian" lands. It could hardly have been a stimulating
atmosphere for would-be inventors.
All of the credit that we are ascribing to Gerbert must therefore
be prefixed with an "if." Did he really invent the clock-movements,
or is this merely another of the tales which have blown down to us
from this age of tradition and romance? For similar tales are told of
Pacificus in 849 A. D. of the early Pope Sabinianus in 612 and even of
Boetheus, the philosopher, as far back as 510 A. D., while always in
the background are claims of priority for the Chinese who are supposed
to have discovered many of our most important mechanical and scientific
principles away off upon the other side of the world before these were
dreamed of in the west.
If all of these various claims were true, which is far from likely, it
still would not need to surprise us, for it must be remembered that
humanity, until within the past few generations, was more or less a
collection of separated units and its records were very incomplete.
There was scant interest in abstract research and very limited
intercourse between towns and countries; one who made an important
discovery in one locality might be unheard of a hundred miles away.
Unless all the conditions were favorable, his ideas might even pass
from memory with his death, until some scholar of modern times might
chance upon their record.
All that can with certainty be said, therefore, is that there were
clocks of some sort in the monasteries during the eleventh century;
that back of these were the clepsydræ and other time recording
devices; and that here and there through the preceding centuries are
more or less believable tales of inventions that had to do with the
subject.
Let it be remembered, too, that some of the brilliant minds of ancient
times made discoveries that were forgotten after the barbarian waves
overwhelmed preceding civilizations. The ages following the downfall of
Rome were those of intellectual darkness, illiteracy, and rude force
until mankind groped slowly back toward the light through the process
of _rediscovery_.
Thus, it mattered not at all to the medieval world that Archimedes,
the great Greek scientist and engineer—who, however, chanced to live
in the Greek colony of Sicily—was able, somewhere about 200 B. C., to
construct a system of revolving spheres which reproduced the motion
of the heavenly bodies. Such a machine must necessarily have involved
some sort of clock-work. We dare not stop to consider Archimedes,
lest we stray too far from our subject, but this marvelous man of
ancient times, the Benjamin Franklin of his day, seems to have had a
hand in almost every sort of mechanical and scientific research, from
discovering the principle of specific gravity, in order to checkmate
a dishonest goldsmith, to destroying Roman war-ships by means of his
scientific "engines." The story is told that he set the ships on fire
by concentrating upon them the rays of the sun from a number of concave
mirrors. And, although this story may not be true, the things that he
is known to have done are extraordinary.
Archimedes and his knowledge had long passed away when the monastery
clocks of the eleventh century began to sound the hour. These were
the fruit of a crude new civilization just struggling for expression,
and represented the general period when William the Conqueror led his
Norman army into England.
CHAPTER SEVEN
_The Modern Clock and Its Creators_
We learn that toward the close of the thirteenth century a clock was
set up in St. Paul's Cathedral in London (1286); one in Westminster, by
1288; and one in Canterbury Cathedral, by 1292. The Westminster clock
and the chime of bells were put up from funds raised by a fine imposed
on a chief justice who had offended the government. The clock bore
as an inscription the words of Virgil: "_Discite justitiam moniti_,"
"Learn justice from my advice," and the bells were gambled away by
Henry VIII! In the same century, Dante, whose wonderful poem the
_Commedia_, (the _Inferno_, _Purgatory_ and _Paradise_) is sometimes
called the "Swan Song of the Middle Ages," since it marks the passing
of the medieval times, spoke of "wheels that wound their circle in an
orloge."
Chaucer speaks of a cock crowing as regularly "as a _clock_ in an abbey
orloge." And this shows, curiously, the early meaning of the word, for
by the word "clock," Chaucer evidently meant the _bell_ which struck
the hour, and, very obviously, he used the word "orloge" to indicate
the clock itself.
Many of these "clocks" had neither dials nor hands. They told time
only by striking the hour. Sometimes in the great tower clocks there
were placed automatic figures representing men in armor or even mere
grotesque figures which, at the right moment, beat upon the bell. These
figures were called "jacks o' the clock" or "jacquemarts" and curious
specimens of them are still in existence.
The early abbey clocks did not even strike the hour but rang an alarm
to awaken the monks for prayers. Here again, the alarm principle
precedes the visible measurement of time; even now, as already noted,
we speak of a "clock" by the old word for "bell."
In the course of the following century—the fourteenth—clocks began
to appear which were really worthy of the name, and of these we
have authentic details. They were to be found in many lands. One of
them was built, in 1344, by Giacomo Dondi at Padua, Italy. Another
was constructed in England, in 1340, by Peter Lightfoot, a monk of
Glastonbury. And in 1364, Henry de Wieck, De Wyck, or de Vick, of
Wurtemburg, was sent for by Charles V, King of France, to come to Paris
and build a clock for the tower of the royal palace, which is now
the Palais de Justice. It was finished and set up in February 1379,
and there it still remains after lapse of five and a half centuries,
although its present architectural surroundings were not finished until
a much later date.
This venerable timepiece termed by some chroniclers "the parent of
modern timekeepers," was still performing its duty as late as 1850.
And so it is a matter of interesting record that its mechanism, which
served to measure the passage of time in the days when the earth was
generally believed to be flat and when the Eastern Division of the
Roman Empire was still ruled from Byzantium, now Constantinople, has
served the same purpose within the possible memory of men now living.
Its bell has one grim association—it gave the signal for that frightful
piece of Medicean treachery, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, planned
by Catherine de Medici, the mother of the King Charles IX, when the
armed retainers of the crown of France flung themselves upon the
unsuspecting Huguenots and caused the streets to run red with the blood
of men, women and children—a ghastly butchery of thousands of people.
As we have seen, de Vick's clock was neither the earliest made, nor
among the earliest; nor, probably, did it embody any at that time new
mechanical invention. It does, however, fairly and clearly typify the
oldest style of clock of which we to-day have any accurate knowledge.
Compare its description, then, with the clock upon your shelf.
We think of the tall-cased "grandfather's clocks" as antique; but this
tower-clock of de Vick's outdoes them in antiquity by some four hundred
years. And its most interesting feature is its curious likeness in
mechanical principle to the clocks of modern times. Like most early
clocks, it has only one hand—the hour-hand. Its ponderous movement is
of iron, laboriously hand-wrought; the teeth of its wheels and pinions
were cut out one by one. It was driven by a weight of five hundred
pounds, the cord of which was wound round a drum, or barrel. This
barrel carried, at one end, a pinion, meshing with the hour-wheel,
which drove the hands; the flange at the other end of the barrel
formed the great wheel, or first wheel of the train. This meshed with
a pinion on the shaft of the second wheel, and this in turn with a
lantern-pinion upon the shaft of the escape-wheel. All of this is, of
course, essentially the modern train of gears, only with fewer wheels.
The escapement is the most important part of the whole mechanism,
because it is the part which makes the clock keep time. It is an
_interrupter_, checking the movement almost as soon as, under the urge
of the mainspring, it starts forward. The frequency and duration of
these interruptions determines the rate of running. Without this, the
movement would run down swiftly; with it, the operation stretches over
thirty hours, involving 432,000 _interruptions_.
[Illustration: A TIME PIECE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
_The huge and elaborate Clock of Strasbourg Cathedral, in Lorraine, was
built in 1352 and is an example of the first clocks._]
De Vick's escapement is shown in the illustration. The escape-wheel was
bent into the shape of a shallow pan, so that its toothed edge was at a
right angle to the flat part of the wheel. Near it was placed a verge,
or rotating shaft, so called from a Latin word meaning "turning
around." On this verge were fastened two flat projections called
_pallets_, diverging from each other at about an angle of one hundred
degrees. The width between the pallets, from center to center of each,
was equal to the diameter of the wheel, so that one would mesh with the
teeth at the top of the escape-wheel and the other with the teeth at
the bottom.
[Illustration: _de Vick's Clock_]
Now, if the upper pallet were between the teeth at the top of the
wheel, the pressure of the wheel trying to turn would push it away
until the teeth were set free. But, in so doing, it would cause the
verge to turn and bring the lower pallet between the teeth at the
bottom of the wheel. And since the bottom of the wheel was, of course,
traveling in the opposite direction from the top, the action would be
reversed, and the lower pallet would be pushed away, bringing the upper
one back between the teeth of the wheel again; and so on, "tick-tock,"
the wheel moving a little way each time, and the pallets alternately
catching and holding it from going too far.
The device was kept running slowly by means of a cross-bar called a
"foliot," fastened across the top of the verge in the shape of a T, and
having weights on its two ends. When this weighted bar was set turning
in one direction, it would, of course, resist being suddenly stopped
and started turning the other way, as it was constantly made to do. And
this furnished the regulating action which retarded the motion of the
works and kept them from running down.
This involves the principle of the modern balance-wheel in both watches
and clocks, which is that of _inertia_; the rim of the balance-wheel
represents the weights on the bar that resist the pull of the pallets.
A vital improvement, however, is the interception of the hair spring
which gives elasticity to the pull and thus supplies the elements of
precision and refinement. The inertia of the balance-wheel is gauged
by the weight of the rim and its distance from the center; and the last
refinement of regulation of the mechanism is produced by moving the
tiny screws on the periphery of this wheel outward or inward.
We shall see later how this old escapement was in principle much like
the improved forms in use to-day. It was as quaint and clumsy an affair
as the first automobile or the first steam-engine. But, like them, it
was a great invention, destined to achieve great results. For it was
the means of _making a machine keep time_. And every clock and watch in
use to-day depends for its usefulness upon a similar device. The tick
is the first thing we think of in connection with a clock; and it is
the most essential thing also, _because it is the escapement which does
the ticking_.
This old clock of de Vick's also struck the hours upon a bell and
in very much the same way as modern clocks are made to do. But the
mechanical means by which it did so are too complicated to be easily
described here. And indeed it is unnecessary to do so, since the bell
is far less important. A clock need not strike, but it must keep time.
On the fearsome eve of St. Bartholomew, therefore, and _again within
the past generation_, the clanging of this old clock's bell was brought
about by the whirling gears and ponderous weights of an early craftsman
who wrought his work into the ages.
As already stated, de Vick's mechanism embodied mechanical principles
which, although greatly developed and improved, are employed even
at the present day. All the essentials of a clock are there; the
motive power—the descent of a massive weight—is now replaced by a
slender spring; the train of gears by which this motion is reduced
and communicated, are cut to-day with the extreme accuracy of modern
machine work; the hand moving around the dial is now accompanied by
a longer, swifter hand to tell the minutes; the escapement which
by checking the motive power while yet allowing it to move on step
by step, retards and regulates—even the numbered striking of the
unchanging hours.
De Vick's old clock may have been a crude machine—it certainly was a
poor timekeeper—but it was the sturdy ancestor of all those myriad
tribes of clocks and watches which warn us solemnly from our towers,
chime to us from our mantels, or, nestling snugly in our pockets, or
clinging to our wrists, help us to maintain our efficiency in the
complexities of modern life. The mechanism employed by de Vick was
retained without any improvement of importance in all the time-pieces
of the next three hundred years. The foliot escapement, especially,
remained in use much longer. Indeed, any modern watchmaker would
recognize that it was practically a horizontal balance-wheel.
Long before it was improved upon, watches had been invented and clocks
had everywhere become common. But we shall reserve the watch for the
next chapter; for the moment, our concern is with clocks alone.
The disadvantage of the medieval clock was its inaccuracy. This was due
first to crude workmanship and unnecessary friction; but that trouble
was presently overcome, for the medieval mechanic could be as fine
and accurate a workman as any modern. He had the artist's personal
pride and pleasure in his skill, and also a great unhurried patience,
somewhat hard for us to picture in this breathless age. At best,
however, his work fell far short of the accuracy possible with modern
machinery. Other important difficulties were found in the expansion
and contraction of parts due to temperature variations, and the fact
that the foliot balance was at its best only when running slowly.
Altogether, then, these early clocks were easily surpassed in accuracy
of timekeeping by a sun-dial or a good clepsydra.
The question arises, therefore, why this newcomer in the field of
timekeeping, should have begun to displace the earlier devices. The
clock was not yet a better timepiece than the sun-dial; why did it grow
more common? Well, for one thing, people like novelties. For another,
people loved their churches and lived by the chimes of distant bells;
and the clock was by far the most practical striking device, whatever
might be its faults in keeping time. But, what was most important of
all, it was a machine, susceptible of infinite improvement and offering
a field for endless ingenuity. It appealed to that inborn mechanical
instinct by means of which mankind has wrought his mastery over the
world.
We have seen how de Vick's clock contained, as it were, the germ
of all our clocks. And, moreover, the medieval regarded machinery
with profoundest awe. It is the unknown which awakes imagination.
_We_ wonder at the cathedrals of his day, but the medieval knew
about cathedrals; he built them. Considering their comparatively
cruder tools, lack of modern hoisting machinery, and so forth, their
architectural and building abilities exceeded even those of to-day. On
the other hand, a locomotive or a modern watch, such as we glance at
without special notice, would have appeared to him the product of sheer
sorcery, too wonderful to be the work of human hands.
The Middle Ages could not much improve their clock without some radical
invention; and such a mechanical type of invention was yet the province
of but few minds. The typical craftsman could merely make the clock
more convenient, more decorative, and more wonderful. To this work, he
and his fellows addressed themselves with all of their patient skill
and their endless ingenuity for ornamentation.
They made clocks for their churches and public buildings, and
elaborated them with intricate mechanical devices. The old "Jacks" that
struck the bells were only a beginning. They made clocks for their
kings and wealthy nobles, adorning them with all the richness that an
artist could design and a skilful jeweler execute. They made clocks
even for ordinary domestic use so quaint in design and so clever in
workmanship that we exhibit them to-day in our museums. One difficulty
in determining the date of the first invention is that long before the
days of de Vick and Lightfoot, machines were made to show the day of
the week and month and to imitate the movements of the stars; and the
first horological records may refer to clock-works of this kind.
The famous clock of Strassburg Cathedral shows the extreme to which the
medieval craftsman carried this kind of ingenuity. It was originally
put up in 1352 and has been twice rebuilt, each time with greater
elaboration. It is three stories high and stands against the wall
somewhat in the shape of a great altar with three towers. Among its
movements are a celestial globe showing the positions of the sun, moon,
and stars, a perpetual calendar, a device for predicting eclipses and
a procession of figures representing the pagan gods from whom the
days of the week are named. There are devices for showing the age and
phases of the moon and other astronomical events. The hours are struck
by a succession of automatic figures, and at the stroke of noon a
cock, perched upon one of the towers, flaps his wings, ruffles his
neck, and crows three times. This clock still remains, having last
been rebuilt in the four years 1838 to 1842. But its chief interest is
that of a mechanical curiosity. It keeps no better time than a common
alarm-clock, nor ever did. And in beauty as well as usefulness, it has
been surpassed many times by later and simpler structures.
For the first really important improvement in clock making we must pass
to the latter end of the sixteenth century. The Italian Renaissance
with its great impulse to art and science has come and gone, and the
march of events has brought us well into the modern world. America had
been discovered a century and is beginning to be colonized. Spain is
trying to found a world empire upon blood and gold and the tortures
of the Inquisition. England is at the height of the great Elizabethan
period. It is the time of Drake and Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh.
At this period of intellectual awakening, a remarkable young man steps
upon the scene. In 1564, the year in which the wonderful Englishman,
Shakespeare, first saw the light of day, the scarcely less wonderful
Italian, Galileo, was born in Pisa. He was gifted with keen eyes and
a swift, logical mind, which left its impress upon so many subjects
of human thought and speculation that we are tempted to stop as with
Archimedes and trace his history. But, one single incident must
suffice.
[Illustration: Ivory and Silver Folding Dial German, Seventeenth Century
Ring Dial in general use during Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century
Universal Cube Dial German, Eighteenth Century
Ivory Compass Dial Italy, 1628
ANCESTORS OF THE WATCH
_Portable and pocket sun dials in the collections of the Metropolitan
Museum._]
In 1581, this youth of seventeen stood in the cathedral of Pisa.
Close at hand, a lamp suspended by a long chain swung lazily in the
air currents. There was nothing unusual in such a sight. Millions of
other eyes had seen other suspended objects going through exactly this
motion and had not given the sight a second thought. At this moment,
however, a great discovery of far-reaching application—one which was to
revolutionize clock construction—hung waiting in the air. Young Galileo
took notice.
The lamp swung to and fro, to and fro. Sometimes it moved but slightly.
Again, as a stronger breeze blew through the great drafty structure, it
swung in a considerable arc, but always—and this was the point which
impressed itself upon the Italian lad—the swing was accomplished in
exactly the same time. When it moved a short distance, it moved slowly;
the farther it moved, the faster became the motion; in its arc it moved
more swiftly, accomplishing the long swing in the same time as it did
the short one. In order to make sure of this fact, Galileo is said to
have timed the swinging lamp by counting the beating of his pulse.