Clockwork

“ 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. ”

“ The clockwork plunger.—The alarum clock can be so arranged that a wheel is suddenly released and allowed to complete one rapid revolution at intervals of, say, one hour. There is a fan-governor by which the speed of the revolution can be regulated and maintained constant. ”

“ DIRECTIONS FOR USING: For THINKING:—Wind the Clockwork Man under his left arm, (marked No. 1) . For SPEAKING:—Wind the Clockwork Man under his right arm, (marked No. 2) . For WALKING and ACTION:—Wind Clockwork Man in the middle of his back, (marked No. 3) . N. B.—This Mechanism is guaranteed to work perfectly for a thousand years. ”

“ The sandwiches are only half cut—"
"It was not until the fifty-ninth century," continued the Clockwork man, speaking with a just perceptible click, "that man became a conjurer in real life. We have here an instance of the complete turning over of human ideas. Ancient man conjured for amusement; modern man conjures as a matter of course. Since the [Pg 99] invention of the clock and all that its action implies, including the discovery of at least three new dimensions, or fields of action, man's simplest act of an utilitarian nature may be regarded as a sort of conjuring trick. ”

“ On the basis of such evidence I have suggested elsewhere9 that the clock is "nought but a fallen angel from the world of astronomy." The first great clocks of medieval Europe were designed as astronomical showpieces, full of complicated gearing and dials to show the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets, to exhibit eclipses, and to carry through the involved computations of the ecclesiastical calendar. ”

“ The clock works all that out in advance. It calculates ahead of our conscious selves. No doubt we still go through the same processes, sub-consciously, all such processes that relate to Cause and Effect. ”

“ I drive the wheel madly as tho’ to o’ertake them,—
Give chase without wisdom, or wit, or avail.
The clock in the workshop,—it rests not a moment;
It points on, and ticks on: Eternity—Time;
And once someone told me the clock had a meaning,—
Its pointing and ticking had reason and rhyme.
And this too he told me,—or had I been dreaming,—
The clock wakened life in one, forces unseen,
And something besides;... I forget what; Oh, ask not!
I know not, I know not, I am a machine.
At times, when I listen, I hear the clock plainly;—
The reason of old—the old meaning—is gone! ”

“ Ian
The clocks! Bring them! [Seizes the spade over by the house; begins to dig a grave behind the sun-dial.] Bring every one! We will bury the clocks before the sun-dial—an offering, a living sacrifice. I tell you this is great, Eloise. What is a clock? Something agreed upon and arbitrarily imposed upon us. Standard time. Not true time. Symbolizing the whole standardization of our lives. Clocks! Why, it is clockiness that makes America mechanical and mean! Clock-minded! A clock is a little machine that shuts us out from the wonder of time. ”

“ In ancient books the word cloche simply stands for a bell,—the monks being accustomed to ring a bell at certain periods marked for them by their sun-dials or hour-glasses, and 'What's o'clock?' in old writers is often merely equivalent to the inquiry, 'What hour was last struck by bell?' The word horologe or hour-measurer of course equally applied to the sun-dial, the clepsydra, and the clock, and this convertibility of terms makes it all the more difficult to trace the point at which the newer invention began. ”

“ It is evident that we are coming nearer now to the beginning of the true mechanical clock, and our last step, also from the Alfonsine corpus of western Islam, provides us with an important link between the anaphoric101 clock, the weight drive, and a most curious perpetual-motion device, the mercury wheel, used as an escapement or regulator. ”

“ The hour is one; through darkness steals the day; Shines in your hearts the morning star's first ray? The clock is two! who comes to meet the day, And to the Lord of days his homage pay? The clock is three! the Three in One above Let body, soul and spirit truly love. The clock is four! where'er on earth are three, The Lord has promised He the fourth will be. The clock is five! while five away were sent, Five other virgins to the marriage went! The clock is six, and from the watch I'm free, And every one may his own watchman be! ”

“ Why do people shut themselves up in the air-tight box of a possible three score years and ten, and call it life? How can you, who are so alive, do so? It seems that you have fallen into the strangely popular error of thinking that clocks measure life. That is not what they are for. A clock is the contrivance of springs and wheels whereby the ambitious, early of a summer's day when sane people are asleep or hunting flowers on the hill-side, keep tally of the sun. ”

“ Let your eight-day clocks—your gilded time-pieces—call you to work, and eat, and rest. We are sacred things, set solemnly apart from all secular uses. Our business is with Eternity, and the Church, and Heaven. Call on us no more to commune with the things of the world, and earth, and time. We are your cathedral bells, but we will be your household clock-chimes no longer."
Then the voice died away on the night air. For a few minutes there was silence, but soon it was broken by sobs and lamentations, and all the people lifted up their voice as one man, and wept. ”

“ THE CLOCKS OF RONDAINE
This story naturally leads to the history of clocks and time-pieces of various kinds, from the crude hour-glass, the burning candle graduated to last a certain time, the water-clock, much the same as the hour-glass, and the dial on which the shadow of the sun is traced, down to the clocks which we [134] have now, and especially those of finest mechanism and beautiful ornamentation.
The industry of clock-making is a very important one. In the United States it has been built up almost entirely in the last sixty years. ”

“ The face of the clock. The hands, like black daggers, had pointed to ten minutes of one. Ten minutes of life! Ten minutes to live! Or—less?
Silence, broken only by the reluctant click-clack, click-clack of the rosewood clock. ”

“ The eyes of the immense crowd are ever being turned towards the lighted clock-face of the "Auld and Faithfu" Tron, the hour approaches, the hands seem to stand still, but in one second more the hurrahing, the cheering, the hand-shaking, the health-drinking, the swaying to and fro of the immense throng, is all kept up as long as the clock continues to ring out the much-longed-for midnight hour. ”

“ Not less curious is the orrery clock, five hundred years old, which illustrates the astronomical ideas of its time in compelling the sun to make a circuit of the dial every day, while the moon occupies a month. ”

“ While I am walking with Michael some one often comes to me to ask the time of day. Few of the people, however, are sufficiently used to modern time to understand in more than a vague way the convention of the hours, and when I tell them what o'clock it is by my watch they are not satisfied, and ask how long is left them before the twilight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ LESSON XXVIII.
THE CLOCK AND THE SUNDIAL. A FABLE. 1. One gloomy day, the clock on a church steeple, looking down on a sundial, said,
THIRD READER. 73 "How stupid it is in you to stand there all the while like a stock! 2. "You never tell the hour till a bright sun looks forth from the sky, and gives you leave. I go merrily round, day and night, in summer and winter the same, without asking his leave. 3. "I tell the people the time to rise, to go to dinner, and to come to church. ”

“ What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure, and silent heart-language of the old dial! ”

“ But there is a clock surpassing all others. I call it God's clock. It is the Sun. Since time began God's clock has kept time. It is the central clock of our universe. It regulates all others. It does not have to be wound. God has seen to that. How can we help worshiping the God who has made such a clock!
MEMORY VERSE, Psalm 74: 16
"The day is thine, the night also is thine; thou hast prepared the light and the sun."
MEMORY HYMN [47]
"Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear." ”

“ We can, however, remember that one more thing which the sun does for us is to tell us the time. God gave him "to rule the day ... and to divide the light from the darkness," and he marks how long our day is to be, "keeping time," as May's verse says, all the world over—for he is the great clock which tells the hours and the days—a clock which never needs to be wound up, and which we can trust, for it never goes wrong. ”

“ Let me illustrate my case by analogy. The working of a clock is a model of uniform action; good time-keeping means uniformity of action. But the striking of the clock is essentially a catastrophe; the hammer might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a deluge of water; and, by proper arrangement, the clock, instead of marking the hours, might strike at all sorts of irregular periods, never twice alike, in the intervals, force, or number of its blows. ”

“ A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. ”

“ The fable of the old clock, which has just been read, is intended to teach us a lesson, or moral, and that is, that whenever we have anything to do, whether it be a long lesson or a piece of hard work, we must not think of it all at once, but divide the labor, and thus conquer the difficulty.
2. The pendulum was discouraged when it thought that it had to tick eighty-six [Pg 24] thousand four hundred times in twenty-four hours; but when the dial asked it to tick half a dozen times only, the pendulum confessed that it was not fatiguing or disagreeable to do so. ”

“ A clock is just a mechanical invention that ticks off the movements of the sun into seconds and minutes and hours. Both clocks and calendars, therefore, are mere measuring tricks. Time goes on, or does not go on, just the same, whether you possess these inventions or whether you do not possess them. Both clocks and calendars go at the same rate whether Time goes fast or slow. ”

“ The improvement of the balance-watch upon the clepsydra or the hour-glass and other early time-keepers caused the change to be made from apparent to mean time, and the increasing requirements of a complex civilization demand more and more attention to the keeping of accurate standard time. ”

“ For if we suppose the time marked to be an hour, the space passed over by the minute hand, that is, the circumference of the dial, has no relation with the hour except what the artificer gave it by so constructing the watch that the minute hand would make one revolution every hour. ”

“ In earlier centuries the rude sun-dial or the rising of a conspicuous star gave points of reference, while the flow of water from the clepsydra, the burning of a candle, or, in the monastic ages, even the continuous chanting of psalms, were the means of roughly subdividing periods, and marking the hours of the day and night.‍212 The sun and stars still furnish the standard of time, but means of accurate subdivision have become requisite, and this has been furnished by the pendulum308 and the chronograph. By the pendulum we can accurately divide the day into seconds of time. ”

“ The clock strikes with a steady pulse, though sometimes it seems in a fever—sometimes in a fit. At any rate we have some fixed standard to correct the calculation of our waking time; but in dreams the standard itself is visionary. ”

“ I believe this humanity clock of mine was suggested to me by Linnæus’ flower clock at Upsal, whose wheels were the earth and the sun, and the figures on its dial were flowers, whereof one always awoke and opened later than another. ”

“ Now, just as she wrote, the clock, which I was careful not to meddle with, had been rapidly gaining time, and I was standing before it, watching it from hour to hour, and slightly changing its rate by dropping small weights upon its pendulum. Time is so important an element with the astronomer, that all else is subordinate to it. ”

“ The big, ugly clock, too, with the pendulum showing through a wreath of flowers on its glass door, has attained the dignity of age, and earned a right to its place on the crowded mantelpiece by ticking out the years for these same generations. ”

“ Maybe God's clock in heaven already points, for you, at the last hour; maybe this is the last time that you will be warned, and then the clock will strike and you will be in eternity. Time and tide are rushing on. Every tick of the clock brings you nearer heaven or nearer hell. Oh! then prepare yourself for the great day, that so when time is dead and gone; when the great clock strikes for the last time, you may be found ready, and go in with Jesus to his marriage feast. ”

“ These dry facts may serve to whet the curiosity of the student in regard to the measurement of time and its origin. They add a piquancy to the clock dial as we now know it. Scientific it is, as one of man's most exact recorders of natural phenomena. That an exact timekeeper should be found in the pocket of every schoolboy would seem an astounding miracle to our ancestors two hundred years ago, or even less than a hundred years ago:
'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own,
writes Pope in his Essay on Criticism in 1725. ”