"The Mainspring of Civilization:" Elements of Timekeeping
In a world where cellphones and wristwatches are ubiquitous, it’s anachronistic to ask somebody what time it is. We’re immersed in time, and the evidence of its passage is all around us.
Of course, timekeeping wasn’t always so formalized and accessible.
For centuries, timepieces were rare, delicate, unreliable, and expensive. Timekeeping was once the esoteric province of scientists, mariners, royalty, and the clergy.
Initially offered as a public service, clocks and watches soon became essential for people from all walks of life as the following excerpt from 1869 in the National Anti-Slavery Standard describes:
Horologist Peter Honig, quoted in 1986 in The Sunday Republican (Springfield, MA), claimed that the first timekeeping devices were not clocks at all but stone calendars, later made portable and more precise in the sundial.
Before there were clock faces, human faces turned toward the sun and the stars to mark the passing of the first increments of time—a day and a night.
As people began to farm, they watched for the patterns of movement in the sky to help them determine the agricultural seasons.
'The first timepieces were calendars,' Honig told a meeting of the Society of the 17th century in Longmeadow.
'As the need arose for farmers to know when to plant and harvest their crops, they made crude calendars by setting up stones to align with the sunset at different times of the year,' Honig said, adding that 'Stonehenge in England is believed to be an ancient solar calendar.'
The ancients’ observations of the sun and stars—and their reverence for them as visible symbols of gods—led scholars to use heavenly bodies for mankind's earthly needs.
Sundials were used at least 5,500 years ago to further divide the day. They were later refined by Middle Eastern cultures who decided to divide day and night into twelve parts each, the birth of our 24-hour day.
A sundial is all well and good so long as the sun is shining, but how does one measure the equal parts of the night?
For this our ancestors turned to the water clock, the sandglass, and the candle.
Graduated candles are relatively simple and were used especially in measuring the duration of prayers.
There were geographic variations on candles. In China and Japan incense sticks were used, and in the South Pacific islands oily nuts were strung together and ignited with the same effect.
The writer who in 1905 cited these innovations noted that although early sandglasses were more sophisticated and precise than candles, they suffered from the same deficiencies—because they were calibrated using candles.
It happens that many ancient sand glasses have been collected by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, some of them dating far back in the middle ages, and the scientists of that establishment, thinking it worth while to test them, have discovered that they are very inaccurate, some of them varying from correctness by as much as seven or eight minutes in the hour one way or the other. The obvious though rather curious explanation of this fact seems to be that when they were made they were timed by the candle, clocks not having been as yet invented and no better standard being obtainable. Such candles, like any others, were sure to burn more slowly at the beginning than later on, and hence their lack of reliability.
The water clock or clepsydra was a sandglass in liquid form: a cylinder open at the top was filled to a certain point with water, then a small valve was opened that allowed the water to escape into a lower vessel at a predictable rate. A float could be added to the upper vessel, and this attached to a bar that moved an indicating hand around a dial set above it.
This resembled what would become the works of mechanical clocks operated by raising weights whose descent would drive the clockworks. There were also floating bowls that filled with water and sank consistently, and floats in the lower vessel with indicating needles referenced to hours.
The Chinese water clock below has tiers of tanks to ensure that the bottommost tank stayed full over the course of hours. This illustration is part of a report on Chinese horology written for the U.S. Patent Office in 1851 by D.J. Magowan, M.D., an American resident in Ningpo (Ningbo), China. The attendant in the illustration would strike a drum to indicate the hours.
Before progressing to clocks and watches more closely resembling those we use today, there was a fascinating development in the late 19th century that bears mention: the pneumatic clock.
During the industrial revolution, the need arose for a time standard as a public service to coordinate labor with industry and harmonize transportation in urban areas. But synchronizing widely distributed clocks in public and private places was problematic. Electricity was not yet available as a utility, however, ducts and subterranean sewer tunnels were, especially in large cities such as Vienna, Austria and Paris, France.
In 1878, two Austrian men, Victor Popp and Ernest Resch, demonstrated clocks operated by compressed air at the Paris Exhibition that year. Their work attracted the attention of the Parisian municipal government, and after a trial period of eighteen months La Compagnie Générale des Horologes Pneumatiques was given a contract to supply time to public and private clocks in Paris for fifty years.
The company set up a steam-driven 3,000 horsepower compressor west of the city at 8 Rue Saint-Fargeau, a distribution station at 7 Rue Ste.-Anne, and another at 6 Rue de la Franche-Comté. These they connected with lead and iron pipes of various sizes, and to those pipes they connect a variety of clocks.
The illustration shows the bellows mechanism that advanced the minute hand.
The pneumatic clock system in Paris operated until 1927, when electric clocks had developed sufficiently to be affordable and reliable.
One of the most interesting benefits of the pneumatic system was that compressed air could also be used to drive machinery all over Paris, and to provide air conditioning and refrigeration.
When air is compressed, it releases heat; when it expands rapidly it absorbs heat.
In Paris, compressed air powered elevators, pumps, and a system of tubes through which 20,000,000 pieces of mail were conveyed in 1889.
Paris wasn’t the only place where pneumatic clocks were once common. In 1897, there was a compressor station in Chicago at the corner of Dearborn and Van Buren streets that operated 1,300 pneumatic clocks. San Francisco also had pneumatic clocks.
In 1898, Philadelphia installed a four-dial pneumatic clock in the tower of City Hall. The dials were twenty-five feet in diameter, and each hand weighed over two hundred pounds.
The problem of placing a clock in the City Hall tower soon proved itself far more difficult than was anticipated. A mechanical one was out of the question for several reasons; the wind pressure at such a height is enormous and constantly varying, making any accurate calculation of the force necessary to move the hands out of the question. The effect of a sleet storm on such a clock would strengthen the idea of the average New Yorker as to Philadelphia's slowness, and even the curiosity of a sparrow might cause someone to miss a train. Again, the four different dials would require so much complicated machinery that it would be easily deranged. Having in mind the futile efforts of Charles V to keep two small clocks in unison, the Commission wisely abandoned the idea of four distinct sets of machinery, fearing the effect on Billy's (i.e., William Penn’s) iron nerve. After the chairman of the Clock Committee, Mr. John Stevens, had made a personal tour of Europe it was decided on his recommendation to have a pneumatic clock. This is now being constructed in Milwaukee by a big clock manufactory. The cost approximates $27,000, not so much when it is considered that the company guarantees that the inaccuracy in time shall not exceed five seconds in a month, one minute a year.
As electricity became more common in America there was an initiative to convey a time signal from the Washington Naval Observatory by having electric utilities lower their voltage for one second each night at 8:00 PM.
Speaking of the Washington Naval Observatory’s time ball signal, that institution provided a brief history of the device on the occasion of the 1999-2000 millennium.
The observatory’s method dates to the first time-ball drop in Portsmouth, England, in 1829. Time balls fed the world's growing need for exactitude. Astronomers could tell time precisely from the stars, and dropping a ball from a pole was how they informed the public, (Steven J.) Dick said.
In 1844, Secretary of the Navy John Mason instructed the observatory to devise a signal so that 'time may be made known every day to the inhabitants of the city of Washington.'
Starting the next year, every day at noon a ball was dropped at the observatory, then at 23rd and E streets NW. Residents could set their pocket watchers and seafarers could calibrate their chronometers which determined longitude.
In 1877, a regular New York City time-ball drop was inaugurated using a telegraph alert from the observatory, with the signal delayed 12 minutes to allow for the time difference between New York and Washington in those pre-time zone days. For years, Western Union sold office clocks that automatically corrected themselves based on a daily signal from the observatory. The observatory sent telegraph signals to city fire stations to ring their bells as 7:00 a.m., noon and 7:00 p.m.
In 1885, the daily time-ball drop was relocated to what is now the Old Executive Office Building near the White House, until the tradition ended in 1936.
Mechanical clocks began to be used during the 12th century but did not supersede earlier designs until several centuries later.
The need for reliable clocks for use on ships and railways was a great incentive in the refinement of timepieces. The navigators of ships needed a precise time reference in order to determine their longitude or position east-west.
The larger watch, or ship chronometer, with its escapement so delicately made and adjusted that it must always be kept in the same position, was greatly improved through the efforts of the British Government in 1714 by offering rewards of ten, fifteen, and twenty thousand pounds to any who should make chronometers that would run so accurately that the longitude of a ship at sea could be determined within 60, 40, and 30 miles. Harrison, the inventor of the compensating pendulum and the compensating balance, which is now used in watches, succeeded in making a chronometer which, after being tested on a long voyage, was found to run so closely that the position of the ship was determined within 18 miles, and he was therefore paid the full award of £20,000. That historic chronometer, which marked a new era in navigation, is now numbered among the treasures of the Greenwich Observatory.
The need for accurate timekeeping for railroads extends beyond scheduling passenger and freight traffic; trains need to avoid collisions when using the same tracks.
'Two hundred years ago there was not one watch in existence that would pass the railway inspection of today,' remarked Charles T. Higginbotham, consulting superintendent of one of the largest watch manufacturing concerns in the city yesterday. 'In 1750 John Harrison, an English watchmaker, won the prize of 20,000 pounds It was offered by his government for a ship chronometer that enabled longitude to be determined to within half a degree by a ship at sea, which meant that the instrument must be within two minutes of true time at the place where set, whereas the limit now fixed for the variation of a railway watch is 30 seconds a week. This means that it shall not vary one second in 20,000. Harrison's chronometer, moreover, was suspended in symbals that neutralized the rolling and pitching of the ship, being maintained always in a horizontal position, while the railway watch is carried in the pocket, is placed in many positions and is subjected to the rapid and continuous jolts and jars of the running locomotive.
Switzerland has been a center of watchmaking excellence since its beginning as a literal "cottage industry" in 1587 when the Frenchman Charles Cusin emigrated to Geneva to teach the craft.
A young Swiss locksmith, Daniel Jean Richard, further developed Swiss watchmaking in 1679 when he designed and fabricated his own watch after repairing several from London.
The Swiss watch industry was founded at Geneva in 1587 by Charles Cusin of Antun, Burgundy. One hundred years later there were registered in that district some 100 watch makers who employed more than 300 workmen and manufactured about 5000 watches. An apprenticeship of five years was required; journeymen had to serve three further years and were then permitted to exhibit their skill by means of a masterpiece.
The actual founder of watch making in the Swiss Jura region, however, is Daniel Jean Richard, a young locksmith from Le Locle in the canton of Neuchatel, who was prompted to change his original trade but the two following incidents:--
In the year 1679 a Swiss horse dealer had brought home a watch from London. The timepiece naturally became the sensation of the neighborhood, but all too soon there came a day when by various erratic actions it began to worry its proud owner until it decided to stop altogether. Neither coaxing nor shaking proved of any avail, and since its usefulness was thus reduced to nil, the horse dealer decided to take a chance and let it be looked over by the young locksmith, who was generally admired for the many artistic wrought-iron objects he turned out in his spare time. Daniel Jean Richard gave the watch a careful examination and, strange to say, it did not take him very long to discover the defect, which he promptly repaired.
The Swiss dominated the watchmaking trade until about 1870, when America’s Waltham Watch Company undercut the Swiss severely by producing inexpensive, reliable watches rather than fancy, handmade works of art.
The observations below are from Dr. Leonard Waldo of the Yale Observatory in 1887.
One is struck throughout this country (i.e., the U.S.) by the general intelligence of our artisans. In a time of dulness we often find artisans of one trade engaged in a totally different class of work. Every one of them feels that there is a possible road to wealth for him by the invention of new tools or better processes in his work. He is only anxious to improve his own condition by increasing his power of production.
Such a man was Aaron L. Dennison of Brunswick, Me. He had a most humble beginning in life, and in his youth worked at shoemaking. At the age of 18 he became apprenticed to a clock and watch maker, and he soon moved to Boston to learn the finer branches of his trade. Mr. Dennison first conceived the idea that timepieces could be made simpler and better so as to be made in large quantities in a manner similar to that used in making fire arms. In 1848 he predicted that the process of making watches would be reduced to a system as expeditious and perfect as that by which guns are made at the Springfield armory. In 1849 he in company with another man found a capitalist willing to furnish the money to start a factory on his plan, the foundation of which was the system of interchangeable works now in use.
Similar attempts had been made in England and in France, but both had been failures, and the first factory in this country was not a success. In May 1857, the factory was bought by Royal H. Robbins. From this time the business began to advance and there are now 18 companies organized in the United States or in progress of organization. In 1880 the value of product of the watch factories of this country amounted to $13,000,000.
The lecturer then turned his attention to the Waltham watch factory, using it to illustrate the growth of the industry. He said that there was little growth to the business until the (U.S. Civil) war broke out. Then there came a great demand, and the buyers did not look for finish; they were satisfied if the watches would run and the cases were strong. The stock of the factory paid a dividend of 4 per cent in the first year of the war, 11 per cent in the second, 22 in the third, and 60 and 150 per cent in the last two years. This would not have been possible if the watches had not been of a low type. The result of this development now is that the common people all want watches, and have them.
What Waltham and similar American watch companies gained in market share came at the expense of Switzerland, where the period became known as the Watch Crisis of 1870. It would not be the last such challenge to Swiss precision. In the 1970s the rise of quartz watches would relegate mechanical Swiss watches to the luxury market. A harbinger of this development appeared on the radio via the Moscow Home Service in 1962:
The idea was that a small battery would send an electric current into a sculpted quartz crystal that would oscillate at about 32,000 times/second. This vibration would be converted to a usable value to calculate the time, initially displayed using an analog set of moving hands. But that limitation didn’t last long.
Another complementary American innovation changed the face of timekeeping forever: digital displays.
The digitals have given the U.S. watch industry a strong boost, since more than 75% of them are manufactured here. 'The Swiss got caught with their pants down,' said [Richard] Jamroz [of Seiko], 'and it seems that they've now grudgingly admitted that they have to get involved in digitals. I say 'grudgingly' because it's sort of demeaning for the people who made precision watchmaking a fine art to find themselves importing the guts of their product from the United States.'
On rights: Trenton Evening Times. Trenton, New Jersey. August 21, 1975. From America's Historical Newspapers
We’ve come full circle, from stone megaliths and sundials without moving parts to wrist computers.
Speaking of computers...
It’s always a good time to consult Readex’s precision research collections.
