by John Biggs
The Greeks called these devices clepsydras, or water thieves, and they began to take more fanciful shapes and offer a number of unique time-telling features – what horologers now call “complications.” A clepsydra known as the Horologion, created by a Macedonian astronomer named Andronicus of Cyrrhus in around 50 BC, showed astronomers as well as townsfolk the time during the day, and at night also provided an indicator for the direction of the wind.
Another clock, devised by Hero of Alexandria around 150 BC, was powered by water filling a drum, and marked the hour using a human figure that pointed an arrow at a meter drawn on a cylinder. As the figure moved upwards it pushed a little water into a circular set of troughs that emptied once a year and adjusted the hour slightly to reflect the differing lengths of days (thereby anticipating leap years). This miraculous invention was called the Ctesibius, after the Greek father of pneumatics, and was one of the first clocks to take into consideration the difference between solar time and man-made twenty-four-hour time. The clock predated similar technology by 1600 years and showed an impressive understanding of the sun’s motion. This handling of the “equation of time,” or the failure of the day to fit neatly into twelve hour increments, was a dauntingly complex problem that took centuries to solve mechanically, yet it was done by an ancient Greek using only water and some plumbing.
The first modern mechanical clock appeared in the eleventh century, when Su Song, a Chinese official, created a clepsydra that looked less like the primitive bowl-and-basin system used for centuries than an early grandfather clock. It still used water, but as a power source, rather than an indicator. As the liquid flowed downward through a series of buckets, the motion of the stream would power the clock. The clock itself consisted of a complex mash of gears, hands, and bells. It could chime the hours and had animated figures that moved and danced at pre-set times.
But even when used as a power source, water, like the sun, had obvious limitations. As the liquid flowed through the machine, friction caused some buckets to refill faster or more slowly than others. To remedy this, a number of solutions were tried to control the rotation of the wheel — or transmission system — and ensure that it “escaped” at exactly the right period. Some escapements used spinning regulators, while others used weights or even pools of mercury that slowly filled portions of the wheel as it turned. Nothing, however, could be done about the power source freezing in the winter or evaporating under the summer sun. You’ll notice that many early water clocks first appeared in temperate climates that weren’t too hot or too cold. Northerners, while enamored with the idea of the water clock, would have to think of something that wouldn’t be affected by the vagaries of weather.
The first true mechanical clocks appeared around 136029 and used falling weights to power the registers. The weights, in this case, acted as a power source and transmitted this power to an escapement that swung back and forth in an exact period. Given a consistent push, a pendulum would move approximately equally back and forth in every subsequent tick, and when connected to the escapement, acted as a balance wheel, controlling the time register as it ticked off the seconds.
These early time indicators, with their ability to move and chime unaided by human hands, must have been magical to lay-people. Once the water stealers and clockwork gadgets began chiming out the hours, priests could call their followers to order, kings could call their people to work at certain times, and the people, if they were savvy enough, could be ensured a fair day’s work. The chimes of town clocks helped citizens know when they needed to light their lanterns. Nights were fraught with peril, and many countries had laws requiring citizens to stay locked in their homes at certain hours. In Paris, to go outside at night without a light could get you fined ten sous, about the price of sixty loaves of bread.30 The town clock, then, was vital and the riotous chimes of many cathedral and church clocks helped define entire neighborhoods as those who could hear one set of bells began to differentiate themselves from those who could hear another set. After all, in London, the bells of St. Clement’s always called out “oranges and lemons” and St. Martin’s was always in debt, forever owing the Old Bailey “five farthings.”
Many early portable clocks, called clocca (Latin for bell), didn’t have faces. An internal power source slowly wound down, and usually a hammer tapped a bell once a day or on the hour, making them more like modern egg timers than real clocks. The first Western versions, created long after the Egyptian clepsydrae, still used water pitchers that slowly sank and triggered a signal, or candles that burned down to nubs. Most of the candle clocks were abandoned for fear of late-night fires. Later, horloges — clocks with hands — were introduced, with and without bells. Often, clocks had elements of both clocca and horloge, offering some continuity in the transition from faceless timepieces that didn’t require reading to ones with complex dials and registers.
If the clocca was a precursor to town-hall, house, and carriage clocks, the horloge anticipated the pocket- and wristwatch. It was when clocks began sporting full faces in about 1400 that the term “watch” came into use, to designate the part that showed the time, while the “clock” was the mechanical part with the bell. A “clock-watch,” then, referred to a watch with a bell. This was soon shortened to clock for anything that told time but was not worn on the person. A timepiece worn on the person and “watched” by other people (nobles often wore theirs on their chest in order to show importance and prestige) then gave “watch” its modern meaning.
Early clock-watchers set their clocks once in the morning and once at night, in time with the tolling of the church clock tower, which, if the church horologer was doing his job, would toll precisely at the rising, and the falling, of the sun. This is what Iago meant in Shakespheare’s Othello when he said “He’ll watch the orologe a double set if drink rock not his cradle,” a double set being a full day.
But time was not equal in every town and city. A clock-keeper on the “drink” could miss a call or be late for duty and clocks ran fast or slow depending on who was maintaining them (in many cases a bad watchmaker was worse than none at all when it came to watch repairs). It wasn’t until the rise of the railroads that the world would share a single standard time. Until the 1800s, time was a concept without precision, and what Breguet and his peers were really measuring was the “measured duration”31 between events, natural and unnatural. A dandy on the Île might set his clock to the bells of Notre Dame, which, in turn, were set to the moment of sunrise or high noon. A farmer in his pasture would set his watch, perhaps, to the crowing of the cock at dawn. Your neighbor’s noon was not your noon. Solar time was eventually wrested out of popular use and “standard time” introduced. Huge swathes of the planet grew to share the same time and clock towers finally chimed in unison, much to the determent of a good night’s sleep.
The religious significance of clocks shaped the words used to describe them. The spring or weight or water wheel — whatever powered a particular timepiece — came to be called the prime mover, after Aristotle’s explanation for the creation of the physical world. The word Germans used to describe nature, zeitgeber (“time-giver”), came to mean clock, too. Clocks often had mystical powers attributed to them, and kings wishing to impress visiting potentates would produce them for inspection.
Because clocks involved trapping energy and transmitting it, they gave rise to a new understanding of physics and led directly to such inventions as water wheels and steam-powered pumps, which predated the steam engine by fifteen hundred years.
But mechanical clocks were far too imprecise to trust for more important matters, so obelisks and sundials held their place in scientific endeavor long after the invention of the first timepieces. Only four centuries after the creation of the first real mechanical clock was the sundial finally made obsolete.
Clocks and watches took on a new urgency during the age of exploration. Overseas travel, especially to distant colonies, was full of peril. Ships could easily drift off course, and a small, un
intended shift in direction could send a ship already overburdened with sugar, tobacco, and pelts into rocks that would send it plunging to the deep without warning. The measure of longitude became a vital necessity.
In theory, the easiest way to compute longitude was to have a clock on board set to the time of the port of origin. One early solution involved something called “sympathetic powder,” a knife, and a wounded dog. Every day, an observer on shore would dip the knife in the powder at a certain time, causing, it was thought, the dog to cry out in pain as the knife once again inflicted its cruel sting through the magic of the sympathetic powder. Luckily, because this method never worked (one questions why the inventors didn’t try it on their own self-inflicted wounds before stabbing a pooch), sailors realized they really needed a good watch instead, thus saving the lives of many hapless pups.
Using a watch, a navigator could compare the time in a distant city with the time indicated by the position of the sun, and derive how far a ship had travelled. In reality, while most clocks worked wonderfully on land, they quickly broke down in the wet, salty air on the decks of heaving ships.
The Greenwich Society, a scientific brotherhood of thinkers at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, called for a solution to the Longitude Problem, a request that brought many of the greatest English minds of the eighteenth century to bear on the issue. Solving it was the last piece of the puzzle of navigation. The government able to measure longitude would be able to control the seas and, thereby, trade with the New World and do battle with the Old while knowing exactly where it was on the map, a sort of proto-GPS. France, Spain, and Holland were also attempting to solve the problem, but the Greenwich Society, funded by the British crown and interested merchants, went about it the most systematically. The Longitude Act, passed in 1714, offered a prize of up to £20,000 (about $4.5 million in modern dollars) to the person who could measure longitude to within thirty nautical miles (thirty-four statute miles) — half a degree of a great circle in topographic terms.
A twenty-year-old carpenter named John Harrison, obsessed with clocks since he was a child, embarked on an unlikely mission to win it. He recognized that the single biggest challenge was changes in temperature. The slow contraction and expansion of a clock’s wood and metal caused it to slow down and speed up. Thus he codified a set of techniques dedicated to the eradication of the clockmakers primary enemy, friction. Harrison set out to reduce friction on all parts and ensure that the most important parts — the springs, the pendulums, and the transmission systems — wouldn’t change shape over time. He would spend the next sixty years perfecting his invention.
Eventually, his chronometer would include a bimetallic strip, a piece of metal made of two connected strips of two different metals. When the temperature got too hot or too cool, the strips would bend and expand at different rates, ensuring that a watch’s internal spring would never change during long voyages. The chronometer also contained a rolling element bearing, a ring containing multiple balls, or bearings. The bearings would reduce friction considerably, ensuring that the barrel and major gears of Harrison’s clock would never slow down due to friction. This ring reduced the need for messy lubricants and made it easy to swap out pieces when repairing the clock. A third innovation was a mechanism to allow the clock to remain running while it was being wound. By separating the mainspring from the movement during winding and keeping a small spring running when the winding key was engaged, the clock could be powered without having to be shut down and risking the loss of accuracy. And by using a wound spring instead of a pendulum, Harrison’s device was considerably smaller than any marine chronometer – the name given to seaworthy clocks — previously built.
In 1761, Harrison’s son William boarded the HMS Deptford with his new clock, the Number 4, and took it on a straight course from England to Jamaica. He kept the clock under four separate locks to prevent tampering. The clock ran only five seconds slow and, when combined with onboard calculations, left the ship less than a mile off course when it made landfall in the Caribbean, a feat that far surpassed all previous attempts.
The longitude problem had finally been solved, but because the board was reluctant to give an unknown and uneducated carpenter the entire prize for his work, it deemed his clock’s exceptional precision to be the result of luck and demanded a repeat performance. Harrison died bitter and nearly robbed of his prize but some of Harrison’s technical insights would eventually find their way, in miniaturized form, into the fine watches made by Breguet and carried by seamen on the very same routes made safe by the marine chronometer.
The value and importance of watchmaking, during Marie-Antoinette’s rule, was at its zenith. Watches were not just baubles — they were weapons and tools that powered the maritime economies of the New and Old World both. Clocks were also important in bureaucratic and logistical matters. In 1760, a very simple striking clock, probably more like a timer, was installed in a nursery for foundling children in the Magdalen Asylum for Protestant Girls in Dublin by Irish philanthropist Lady Arabella Denny that would “mark, that as children reared by the spoon must have but a small quantity of food at a time, it must be offered frequently; for which purpose, this clock strikes every twenty minutes, at which notice all the infants that are not asleep must be discreetly fed.”32 In short, the clock kept these children alive by regimenting their eating and changing schedules. Thirty years later, in about 1788, a factory whistle, run by a precise clock and controlled by the plant foreman, would prod those same infants, now grown, into the Industrial Age. Watches were commoditizing time and turning organic, loafing wool-gatherers into modern clock-watchers.
Watches and clocks also possessed a kind of mystique. While they were of vital importance to sea captains, on land they were marvels in their own right, as triumphs of ingenuity and technology. In the storefronts of Paris and London, nobles spent vast sums on fashionable clocks. Some bought a watch for each of their court outfits, and many kings and emperors spent fortunes on watches for their wedding or ball guests.
The eighteenth-century watch buyer saw a dash of adventure in each new model. The more complex watches and clocks took years to build, and even the less advanced pieces made by lesser manufacturers were considered de rigueur among the moneyed classes. No good home was without a chiming mantle clock or larger grandfather model to keep the family and household in order. In an age of exploration, a watch was a constant reminder of distance and mystery. For the most part, people didn’t depend on clocks to meet precise appointments – royals were expected to arrive in timely fashion for religious services and some public appearances, but usually an hour hand would suffice for such occasions. There was no “on time” or “late,” just a vague notion of when things — prayer, vespers, and appointments — had to take place.
As watchmaking boomed into a golden age of horology, three countries were dominant: England, France, and Switzerland. In Switzerland, watchmaking was most deeply ingrained. The Geneva/Neuchâtel region was sparsely populated, but because of a historical quirk — the austerity preached by John Calvin — it held a high density of some of the greatest watchmakers in the world. Before the rise of Protestantism, Geneva had been a center for jewelry making. Travelers from points east would roll through and request delicately wrought items in gold and silver, inlaid with precious stones. Whimsical shapes — flowers, crosses, and tiny animals — came out of the goldsmiths’ shops along the city’s boulevards. Starting in 1541, however, Protestant refugees streamed into Switzerland, led by Calvin, who preached that ostentatious jewelry was an affront to God. Jewelers accustomed to melting gold into flowers adapted by making watches instead. Because watches were tools, they passed muster with Calvin. As one historian later observed, if Calvinists, always counting down the seconds toward judgment, “were not interested in time and its measurement, who was?”33 Watches were a church-sanctioned way for Calvinist burghers who wanted to add a bit of flash to their black-and-white clothes to do so. Jewelers converted en ma
sse to watchmaking.
Switzerland became a powerhouse in the watch economy for other reasons as well. The metals available to watchmakers in the Jura Mountains were plentiful and trade routes brought them what they could not mine themselves. By dint of geography and climate, the roads to the mountains closed near the end of October, leaving the farmers, butchers, and innkeepers trapped, with time on their hands and little to do. For centuries, these Swiss had spent their winters making lace, the men maintaining the fire and keeping the livestock healthy while the women and children produced the stuff for export. Lace was slightly profitable, but not everyone could make it well. Due to the mineral-rich soil and the proximity to mines, however, metalworking was almost in the blood. Every house had a forge. With the rise of watchmaking, a new business began to bloom.
Watchmaking – or at least the manufacture of small parts for watches – could be done by anyone, and an entire family could stamp out hundreds of parts a week, all within a certain threshold of precision. In fact, in terms of focus and entrepreneurial attention, watchmaking “swept all else aside.”34 Some farmers stopped growing crops and rented their land to men from the cities and simply made watch parts. Watchmaking, after all, was less work and considerably more lucrative.
Swiss families in the mountains – women and children included – were allowed to perform tasks like movement assembly reserved for only skilled guild men in France and England and even nearby Geneva. While this practice may not have enhanced quality, it allowed Geneva to corner the market in small, inexpensive watches made for export. It also trained whole generations — men and women both — in the art of watchmaking.