Harry Chase Brearley

“ 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. ”

“ But there is one thing in our modern timekeeping which we still have in common with the first men who ever kept the time. We still go by the sun and the stars and refer all our measure to that apparent revolution of the heavens which we know to be really the motion of our world itself. As did those wise men of old Babylon, so do we even now, spying upon the mighty master clock of the universe to correct all our little timepieces thereby. A man sits alone in an observatory, with his eye to a telescope. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You merely take your watch from your pocket and look expectantly up the line. Perhaps a minute before the train is due, you hear a distant whistle, then the approaching roar of wheels upon the rails, and, just as the watch-hand reaches the proper moment, the train itself whirls round the curve and draws up to the station, exactly on time. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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, [86] 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. ”

“ 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 [41] 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. ”

“ In order to gain an idea of a guild, imagine in this country a single association of jewelers to which everyone connected with the jewelry business was forced to belong, whether he were manufacturer or retailer, employer, or employee, the head of his firm or the last new clerk behind the counter. Or, to look at it in another way, imagine a trust controlling the whole industry and a union including all the workmen under a closed-shop system, and then suppose that the trust and the union were one and the same. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [37] 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is like a great ocean which flows round all of the earth, and neither begins nor ends in any one place. But time for any man is exactly according to his use of it. It is as though a man were to go to the shore of the boundless ocean, with a tin cup in his hand. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Howard's ambition lay in the production of a perfect watch for its own sake; and he wanted to make it by machinery, believing that, in that way, it could be made most perfectly. Other people had thought of the same thing. Pitkin had attempted it, and there had been some experiments [165] of like nature in Switzerland. But the man who loves his work as Howard did will succeed in anything short of the impossible, because neither time nor labor, neither failure nor discouragement, matter at all to him as against the hope of making his dream come true. ”

“ From that time on, the important improvements of clockwork were chiefly made in two directions—those of the mechanical perfection of the escapement and the compensation for changes of temperature.
There is a little world of invention and discovery behind the face of the clock which beats so steadily on your mantel. Look within if you will, and see the compact mechanism with its toothed gears, its coiled spring, or its swinging [91] pendulum, in which the motion of the cathedral lamp is harnessed for your service,—nothing in that grouping has merely happened so. ”

“ Ingenuity was in the air and invention was conquering realms that had been believed beyond reach.
When people told Howard that it was absurd to think of improving upon the manual skill of centuries, he answered that he expected to make his machinery by hand. And when they said that a machine for watch-making would be more wonderful than the watch itself, he only laughed and agreed that this might be so. ”

“ You see the conductor glance at his watch as he gives the engineer the starting-signal. You realize that the whole transportation system is merely an enormous piece of clockwork and that it, in turn, is a part of the vaster clockwork of modern civilization. ”

“ The whole Western Union system will suspend business for a little, while the lines are connected and the observatory at Washington ticks off the seconds. Everywhere there are electric clocks, automatically controlled by some master clock, which, in its turn is governed by the observatory time. So we all, as a matter of course and without thinking, set our watches by the star. Civilization every day catches step with the heavenly bodies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The caveman lived, perhaps, as many years as we—but how much did he do in those years? We, who have learned to measure years and to allot each day or hour to sundry tasks, have made ourselves able to do far more in a life-time—many times more. We do not live a greater number of years, but it is as if we lived many lives in 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How a Mechanical Toy Became a Scientific Timepiece Now, since we are at last well into the story of the watch, let us glance back over the road we have traveled. We have seen man first beginning to think of time by noting the positions of shadows or the motions of the stars. Next, we have seen him making his plans for days ahead by means of the changes in the moon, then by making such division in the flow of time as the month, the season, and the year. ”

“ If you do not stand out above your age, as they did above their ages, it is simply because millions of other people besides yourself also possess these powers. It is undoubtedly true that we are to-day a race of giants, and it is also true that each of our powers is directly or indirectly due to the common fact that we all can keep track of time. For consider that what mankind can accomplish to-day depends upon the ability of people to work together, and that working together would cease if people had no accurate means for telling time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The old idea of regarding the watch as a trinket rather than as a timepiece, as an expensive toy rather than as an accurate and necessary mechanism, has come down to us from the days when a watch was ornamented outside, because it could not be really useful within. Even now, in spite of the modern demand for accurate timekeeping, that attitude has not entirely died away, as is shown by the expression "gold watch" and "silver watch." Of course, there are really no such things; there are merely gold and silver cases for steel, brass and nickel watches. ”