Horology

“ 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. ”

“ Now, the exact time of the day at the place where we are, can be ascertained by well known and easy observations of the Sun if visible for a few minutes at any time from his being ten degrees high until within an hour of noon, or from an hour after noon until he is only 10 degrees high in the afternoon; if therefore, at any time when such observation is made, a Timekeeper tells us at the same moment what o'clock it is at the place we sailed from, our Longitude is clearly discovered. ”

“ For the use of men engaged in practical astronomy, it is very convenient to consider the sun,27 moon, stars, and planets as going round the earth at rest. For instance, seamen use the heavenly bodies as in a way hands of a huge clock from which they can know the time and their position on the earth. “The Nautical Almanac,” which is printed yearly, gives the true position of these heavenly bodies for every hour, minute, and second of the year, and I will presently show how useful this is to sailors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The difference between clock time and Sun time is called the equation of time, and a table to show how many minutes and seconds the Sun is fast or slow, [Pg 208] according to clock time, is given above, taken from “The New Astronomy,” by Professor Todd, who has kindly permitted me to use it here. In the table S means that the Sun is slow, that is, that the Sun does not cross the meridian until after the clock shows noon, and F means that the Sun is fast, that is, that the Sun has crossed the meridian before the clock shows noon. m means minutes, and s means seconds above the figures. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is well that modern clocks have no wise saws and [Pg 32] mottoes telling of the unalterable hand of Time; "Old Time, the clock-setter, that bald sexton, Time," as Shakespeare says in King John.
Early Mechanism.—The problem for the old clockmakers who wished to supplant the primitive measurement of time by candle, by the hour-glass, and later by the sundial, was to produce a piece of mechanism which would in twenty-four hours, the prescribed period of day and night, indicate the flight of time hour by hour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Time, as measured by the sun, is called apparent time, and a clock so regulated as always to keep exactly with the sun, is said to keep apparent time. Mean time is time reckoned by the average length of all the solar days throughout the year. This is the period which constitutes the civil day of twenty-four hours, beginning when the sun is on the lower meridian, namely, at twelve o'clock at night, and counted by twelve hours from the lower to the upper meridian, and from the upper to the lower. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Calendar work on watches is, of course, fatal to great accuracy of time-keeping, and is very complicated. A watch is made to record days of the week and month, and to take account of leap years usually by the aid of star-wheels with suitable pauls and stops. The type of this mechanism is to be found in the calendar motion of an ordinary grandfather's clock. ”

“ The rhythms of human chronology may thus be grouped according to source in two classes, the imposed and the original; and the same distinction holds for other rhythms. The lunar day is an original rhythm of the earth as seen from the moon; the ground swell is an original rhythm of the ocean; but the tide is an imposed rhythm of the ocean, being derived from the lunar day. The swing of the pendulum is an original rhythm, but the regular excursion of the chronograph pen, being caused by the swing of the pendulum, is an imposed rhythm. ”

“ But the moon alone moves with sufficient rapidity to act as a time indicator for terrestrial voyagers. It is hardly necessary to explain why rapidity of motion is important; but the following illustration may be given for the purpose. The hour-hand of a clock does in reality indicate the minute as well as the hour; yet, owing to the slowness of its motion, we regard the hour-hand as an unsatisfactory time-indicator, and only consider it as showing what hour is in progress. ”

“ 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 lunar clock has, so-to-speak, a more varied and mysterious mechanism than the solar, and it certainly has impressed itself to a great extent in folklore, a fact to which Dr. Rivers has drawn the attention of the Society. [5] Finally, the sidereal clock, by the rising and setting of stars and constellations with its annual periodicity, gives the precise information that is required, thus the agricultural and other operations are generally regulated by the very backward peoples by the movements of stars. ”

“ Astronomical year, the interval between one vernal equinox and the next, or one complete mean apparent circuit of the ecliptic by the sun, or mean motion through 360° of longitude—365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 49.7 seconds—called also the Equinoctial, Solar, or Tropical year; Canicular year—the ancient Egyptian—counted from one heliacal rising of Sirius to the next— (the Canicular Cycle was the cycle of 1461 years of 365 days each, or 1460 Julian years, also called the Sothiac period) ; Ecclesiastical year, the year as arranged in the ecclesiastical calendar, with saints' days, festivals, &c. ”

“ This happened in ancient Greece, where the stars served for the time-reckoning of sailors and peasants while the lunisolar calendar was developed and extended under sacral influence; the festival calendar, which was regulated and recorded by the moon, became the official civil calendar. It was only later that the stellar calendar was systematically brought under the influence of the fully developed astronomy and of the Julian calendar.
In sailing, the stars afford to the primitive sea-faring peoples the only means of finding their way when the land can no longer be seen. ”

“ If we now find this inconspicuous part of the heavens equally honoured by several nations in very ancient times, we shall be led to think either that these nations, independently of each other, happened to observe and mark out the sun’s annual course through the heavens at exactly the same date, and therefore chose the same point as marking the winter solstice; or we must suppose that they derived their calendar and knowledge of the Zodiac from observations originally made by some one civilized race. ”

“ The astronomer's principal clock—the one he uses in all his calculations—marks what is known as sidereal, not ordinary, time. The revolution of the earth in its orbit sets the sun back in its [Pg 215] place in the heavens at the rate of about four minutes a day, or one whole day in a year, so that this clock, indicating star time, gains this amount and is only with ordinary clocks once a year. ”

“ If, then, it should appear that these races possessed and incorporated into their mythologies a knowledge of the Zodiac, and of the first degree of Aries as its initial point, their separation from the parent stock must have been subsequent to the formation of the scheme that dealt with a calendar based on an observation of the colure of the winter solstice at that point, and under this supposition the date of 6,000 B.C. becomes a foothold for the chronology of ancient history. ”

“ On the cosmic clock, by whose pendulum alone we can faintly measure the dim ages behind us, the brief lapse of historical time, from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to the events narrated in this evening’s Pall Mall, is less than a second, less than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can possibly guide our blind calculations. ”

“ Old-fashioned Almanacs, which use apparent time, give the rising and setting of the sun's centre, and make no allowance for the effect of refraction of the sun's rays by the atmosphere. The more modern and improved Almanacs, which use clock time, give the rising and the setting of the sun's upper limb, and duly allow for refraction. ”

“ All over the Solar System, except on Earth itself, the clocks read the same as they do in Greenwich, England. Time zones don't mean anything anywhere except on Earth, where the natives feel that the sun should be at the zenith when the clock says twelve. ”

“ The Saros of the Chaldaeans, the Olympiad of the Greeks, and the Roman Indiction are instances of this mode of reckoning time. Several cycles were formerly known in Europe; but most of them were invented for the purpose of adjusting the solar and lunar divisions of time, and were rather employed in the regulation of the calendar than as chronological eras. They are frequently, however, of very great use in fixing dates that have been otherwise imperfectly expressed, and consequently form important elements of chronology. (W. L. R. C.)
Modern Results of Archaeological Research. ”

“ One of the uses of the clock showing sidereal time in connection with the convenient fiction of the “Mean Sun,” is to give to the outside world a constant flow of mean time regulated to the average southing of the sun in the middle of the period for which the sun is above the horizon each day in the year. ”

“ The most conclusive proof, however, of the antiquity of Chaldæan science is afforded by the measures of time which were established prior to the commencement of history, and have come down to the present era in the days of the week and the signs of the zodiac. There can be no doubt that the first attempts to measure time 153 beyond the single day and night, were lunar, and not solar. The phases of the moon occur at short intervals, and are more easily discerned and measured than those of the sun in its annual revolution. ”

“ The Several Branches of a Great Art.—The timekeeper—whether it be the scientific astronomical clock, or the chronometer used by mariners, or the modern watch, minute in size but recording time with accuracy, or the bracket or table clock, or the long-case clock—has proceeded on parallel lines of development. ”

“ Experience, and to a certain extent tradition, are their only guides for telling the different seasons of the year; they have not the slightest remembrance of their ancient calendar system. They are accustomed to hear clocks strike where such exist, but otherwise, simply from the course of the sun, moon, and stars, they are able to regulate the hours of the day and night, more or less. ”

“ As a day is the period of the revolution of the earth on its axis, so a year is the period of the revolution of the earth around the sun. This time, which constitutes the astronomical year, has been ascertained with great exactness, and found to be three hundred and sixty-five days five hours forty-eight minutes and fifty-one seconds. The most ancient nations determined the number of days in the year by means of the stylus, a perpendicular rod which casts its shadow on a smooth plane bearing a meridian line. ”