Telling The Time

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 282, 18 February 1928, Page 24

Telling The Time

BHROUGH the ages man | has used many methods of reckoning time. Befor the dawn of history he measured time by the shadows cast upon

rocks—a principle later worked out in the sundial. The phases of the moon divided periods and seasons.

The cave man, with awakening intelligence, developed an ingenious method of time telling through ropes of grass in which knots were tied at equal distances. He set fire to one end of the rope and crudely measured the time required in burning from one knot to another. The grass rope was a prehistoric ancestor of the “time candle,” with its notches cut at regular intervals, or with alternate black and white stripes. When the time candle burned to the third notch it was time to feed the baby; at the fifth notch or stripe, the housewife put on the potatoes to boil for the evening meal; at the last notch the family went to bed—the most natural thing to do when the light failed. In the thirteenth century there was invented the nearest approach to pre-sent-day clocks. The word “clock” is a derivation of “glocken” or “cloches” —bells, which struck the hours. In 1504 a young locksmith in Nuremberg, while serving a term in prison, made the first watqh. It was as big as a saucer and was manufactured of iron. Its accuracy, however, could not be relied on, for it lost an hour daily; but when the lost hour was an established fact, the owner could estimate time quite exactly. The night watchmen carried these huge watches, and it was for this reason that they were given their name. The next important invention in the progress toward the modern watch was a hairspring, so called because it was fashioned out of a pig’s bristle. The hairspring in modern watches is made of steel wire, so fine that it resembles a spider’s web.

Compare the “insides” of a pig’s bristle watch with the delicate mechanism of the twentieth century product, which, in a lady’s wrist watch, has screws so infinitesimal that a thimble will hold 20,000. For one pound avoirdupois, 583,333 of these screws are required. But each has a bevelled gear, a slot and a spiral thread. Its weight is 12 one-thou-sandths of a grain. Present-day watches contain 211 pieces, one-third of which are screws.