The New Collector’s -2- Guide to Pocket Watches
Although water may appear to drip at a steady, fixed rate, in fact
the more water is in the vessel the faster it leaks out due to the
pressure exerted by the weight of the water. The ancient
Egyptians solved this problem by using vessels with slanted sides
to equalize the water pressure as the amount of water decreased.
Other problems, however, included the fact that the hole through
which the water dripped tended to get larger over time, thereby
permitting more water to pass through quicker, and the fact that
the escape hole also had a nasty tendency to get clogged. And
heaven forbid it should get cold enough for the water to actually
freeze! Water clocks, by their very nature, were also not
particularly portable.
Well, it didn’t take people long to realize that water isn’t the only
thing that flows at a steady pace, and next up came the
hourglass
, invented sometime around the 8
th
century A.D. The
main reason it wasn’t invented earlier was probably simply
because nobody was able to blow glass well enough before then.
The hourglass uses sand flowing from one glass vessel into
another through a tiny opening which connects the two, and the
passage of the sand is not particularly affected by the things
which caused problems with the water clock and the sundial
before it. However, large hourglasses were impractical, and
keeping time for any extended period usually meant turning the
glass over and over again over the course of a day. Basically, it
made a great timer, but a lousy timekeeper.
And that’s pretty much how things stood until the 1300's, when a
bunch of monks in Europe decided they really needed a better
way to tell when it was time to pray. For, you see, a monk’s life
revolved around a set schedule of prayers – one at first light, one
at sunrise, one at mid-morning, one at noon, one at mid-
afternoon, one at sunset and one at nightfall. Knowing the
correct time therefore became more than just a nicety – it was a
religious imperative! And, as a result, these monks devised the
first known mechanical clocks
. The word “clock,” by the way,
comes from the Dutch word for “bell,” since these early
mechanical clocks had no hands and were designed to simply
strike the hour.
In addition to the bell striking mechanism, these early clocks had
two important requirements. The first was a source of power, and
this was provided by a weight attached to a rope or chain. The
weight was carried or pulled to the top of the clock, and gravity
would do the rest. The second was some way to force the weight
to fall in a slow, measured pace instead of plummeting like, well,
a lead weight. And this was provided by a wonderful and