Clocks, the Evolution of Time

Clocks, the Evolution of Time

Can you imagine going through an entire twenty-four hours without seeing a clock or knowing what time it is? It seems like a silly question considering we take clocks for granted. They have always been an integral part of our lives.

Centuries ago, before the invention of the clock, man’s time was simply divided into day and night. The Sun was man’s clock because it was always there casting shadows. This brought about the invention of the sun dial. It worked fine during the daylight, but what about nighttime? Of course, there was also a problem on cloudy days. Man worked during the day but had no need to measure the night because it was useless except for sleep. The day and night were actually considered different phenomena and were not considered a single unit. No one conceived of dividing a day into twenty-four equal hours.

Other methods were used as a means of timekeeping over the years. Most of these like the sand glass and the water clock depended on something flowing through them. All of them had their drawbacks and consequently did not give an accurate accounting of the time. The water clock was the first one that could actually be used to measure time in both day and night.

It wasn’t until late in the thirteenth century that the mechanical clock was invented. Instead of depending on something flowing through it, the mechanical clock was driven by weights and gears and was possibly invented by Muslim engineers.

These early mechanical clocks had their own problems. There was a lot of friction between the parts and the gears were all cut by hand. Some of them lost as much as an hour a day. Can you imagine trying to be on time for work if you were depending on one of these clocks?

Finally in 1657 the pendulum clock was invented. Galileo actually came up with the design for the pendulum clock, but Huygens built the first one. The pendulum clock went through many changes and its own challenges. The early pendulum was made of metal which expands and contracts according to the weather. This led to inaccuracies in the time. Nonetheless, with improvements over the years the pendulum clock has survived. Today we have pendulums in our Grandfather clocks and in some wall clocks.

But the evolution of the clock was not finished yet. In the 1920’s a clock was built in the Bell Laboratories using a quartz crystal. It was far more accurate than the earlier pendulum clock could ever be. It also didn’t have the problems of changes in temperature affecting its parts like the pendulum clock. Most of the clocks and watches that we have today still use the quartz movements.

The clock has gone through many changes over the years. Instead of depending on the Sun and counting the day and night as separate phenomena, the clock has made it possible for us to measure each hour, minute and second of every day. The word day is correctly used to refer to a twenty-four hour period including the day hours and the night hours. It is hard to imagine what life would be like without the clock.