What is Time? Introduction to Clocks and Time pieces, Jake Jackson's These Fantastic Worlds

What is Time? Clocks and Timepieces

Any clock must have a steady repetitive action and be able to display the units of its progress. The later history of clocks is characterised by the determined search of astronomers and mathematicians to measure these units more accurately. 

(This is the first post of Time and Clocks, the thread that follows Time and Calendars.)

A Quick history of Clocks

Moroccan Klepsydra, a traditional water clock.

Moroccan Klepsydra, a traditional water clock. The smaller bowl has a small hole in its centre. When it sinks below the water level a certain period of time is over.

In Europe sundials, waterclocks and the first mechanical clocks only normally gave hours as units until the pendulum movements in the mid-seventeenth century brought accuracy to within about a minute a day. Seconds dials appeared from the 1670s, and stop-watches showing hundredths of a second appeared by 1800. The quartz and atomic clocks of the mid- and late-twentieth century have achieved an astonishing degree of accuracy, so much so that the measurement of time has been wrested from its roots in the natural rhythms of the day, the passage of the seasons.

Time Keepers Empire

Clock time – our time – is now controlled by the vibrations of the caesium atom, so that the second, which used to be expressed as a fraction of the solar year, is now defined by observing the behaviour of caesium.

In this way time has been wrested from the observations of astronomers, whose work had made them the keepers of time from the ancient worlds of the Babylonians, Greeks and Chinese until the invention of quartz oscillations in the 1930s. Now in the hands of mathematicians and physicists and their calculations of quantum mechanics, time, as relayed by clocks, is controlled by world standards that exceed the accuracy of the planetary motions which astronomers observed so faithfully. Humankind now exercises a collective control over its measurement of time, going far beyond the passive and subjective observations of former eras.

East to West

The pendulum clock accelerated the process of change, giving its European discoverers an enormous advantage over other cultures in the three centuries from the late 1500s. It marked a level of collective cultural discipline not unlike that of Caesar’s Julian calendar, which provided him with a means of defining events throughout his Roman Empire. The Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and British created empires and could maintain control by using the disciplines of reporting and acting on certain days and at certain times. In this way small, but the nations of Europe were able to conquer and rule more ancient civilisations in India and the Middle East until the late twentieth Century.

The next post will cast much further back though, to the sunclocks which began our human interpretations of Time.

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Posts in the Time & Clocks Thread

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