What is Time? Mechancial Clocks, Jake Jackson's These Fantastic Worlds

What is Time? Mechanical Clocks

The emergence of mechanical devices as a means of telling the time was the start of a revolution in timekeeping, relieving the general public from reliance on freezing waterclocks or cloud-obstructed sundials.

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

Europe emerged from its Dark Ages, with stability and order spread throughout a landmass that had suffered barbarism and ignorance to such an extent that it had lost almost all its technological advances.

However, a still small voice of consistency had remained in the corridors of the monasteries and abbeys of the Christian Churches which, although surrounded by rural populations who used the dawn, noon and twilight as their markers of time, quietly continued their liturgical labours, marking hours with bells and calls.

The First Mechanical Clock

Europe’s emergence from the Dark Ages was partly a result of the influx of ideas and knowledge from the East, reconnecting Europe with the noble traditions of the Greeks, Romans and the Babylonians. The French scholar and priest Gerbert of Aurillac was instrumental in the resurgence of Western Europe, having studied mathematics and astronomy at the Islamic court of Spain. He is thought to have invented the first mechanical clock in 996 CE, and later became Pope Sylvester II with all the influence that implies. Throughout the Western Middle Ages, there was only one name for a clock – horologium – and it is impossible to tell whether water, sun or mechanical clocks are referred to during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is not known precisely who did invent this new phenomenon, but from the early 1300s there is evidence from the hundreds of repair, maintenance and purchase bills which relate to the use and the cost of mechanical clocks in towers, monasteries and churches.

In Paradiso, written around 1320, Dante uses a clock as a powerful metaphor for life, clearly expecting it to be understood:

And the wheels in the clock works, which

Turn, so that the first to the beholder

Seems still, and the last, to fly.

Richard of Wallingford and Lazar the Serb

(Left) 14th century Richard of Wallingford, Abbot of St. Albans, mathematician and inventor of a mechanical astronomical clock. (Right) Lazar the Serb showing Vasily I of Moscow (1371–1425 CE) his mechanical clock.

The Clock Movement

For 300 years, these early clocks worked on a similar principle to the reverse action of a water well where a weight is tied to a rope wound round a revolving drum in order to turn the handle. For clocks however, an escapement mechanism would be needed to regulate the flow of this falling momentum.

The first mechanical movements, in the spirit of the calling and campanology of religious time, provided a prompt for a bell to be struck by human hand. The mechanism was quickly made to strike the bell itself, and eventually turn hands which could roughly display the hour. It is no accident that our word ‘clock’ is derived from the ancient Celtic word, clocc, from which are derived the French cloche, German glocke and Scandinavian klokk, all of which mean a bell. Earliest known clocks in England include Westminster in 1288 and Canterbury in 1292. The clock of Norwich Cathedral in 1325, built by Roger Stoke, used a simple escapement form called the verge and foliot.

Motion of the Verge and Foliat Clock

Social Consequences of Clocks

These developments, although only as accurate as many of the waterclocks, did prove to be a more practical alternative and the introduction of the mechanical clock gave rise to a kind of civic time, with some cities constructing a large central clock, often in a clock tower, emphasising the gathering power of visible time as a means of controlling the way of life beyond the command of the Church.

For the aristocracy and the emergent, expanding mercantile classes this was good news, but for the workers it gave their taskmasters more precise control over their movements. In Amiens, France, for instance, in 1335, the king permitted the mayor ‘an ordinance concerning the time when the workers … should go each morning to work, when they should eat, and when return to work after eating … they might ring a bell … in the belfry’.

Clocks also shadowed the rise of numeracy, developing precisely at a time, as we have seen, that knowledge from the East cross-fertilised with European culture, bringing within it the arithmetic learning of the ancient Hindus (particularly the concept of zero), then widespread in the Middle East. Clocks gave everyone a more precise sense of units of time. This coincided with the rapid increase of trade from 1100 and meant that traders had to be able to count their goods and make contracts with merchants from the Middle East.

In the next article on we take a look at spring-loaded and fantastical clocks…

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