Time Telling through the Ages

In 1581, this youth of seventeen stood in the cathedral of Pisa. Close at hand, a lamp suspended by a long chain swung lazily in the air currents. There was nothing unusual in such a sight. Millions of other eyes had seen other suspended objects going through exactly this motion and had not given the sight a second thought. At this moment, however, a great discovery of far-reaching application – one which was to revolutionize clock construction – hung waiting in the air. Young Galileo took notice.

The lamp swung to and fro, to and fro. Sometimes it moved but slightly. Again, as a stronger breeze blew through the great drafty structure, it swung in a considerable arc, but always – and this was the point which impressed itself upon the Italian lad – the swing was accomplished in exactly the same time. When it moved a short distance, it moved slowly; the farther it moved, the faster became the motion; in its arc it moved more swiftly, accomplishing the long swing in the same time as it did the short one. In order to make sure of this fact, Galileo is said to have timed the swinging lamp by counting the beating of his pulse.

Thus was discovered the principle of the pendulum and its "isochronism." By "isochronism" we mean inequal arcs in equal time. In other words, any swinging body, such as a pendulum, is said to be "isochronous" when it describes long or short arcs in equal lengths of time. This also applies to a balance-wheel, and hair-spring. And herein lies a remarkable fact – this epoch-making discovery was after all but a rediscovery. The isochronism of a swinging body was known in Babylon thousands of years before, although the Babylonians, of course, could not explain it. Lacking in application, it had passed from the minds of men, and it remained for Galileo to observe the long-forgotten fact and to work out its mechanical application. He did not himself apply this principle to clock-making, although some fifty years later, toward the end of his life, he did suggest such an application.

The first pendulum clocks were probably made about 1665, by Christian Huyghens, the celebrated Dutch astronomer and mathematician who discovered the rings of Saturn; and by the English inventor, Doctor Robert Hooke. The invention is claimed for several other men in England and abroad at about the same time; but hardly upon sufficient authority.

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 pendulum, in which the motion of the cathedral lamp is harnessed for your service, – nothing in that grouping has merely happened so. You may or may not understand all the action of its parts, or the technical names of them; but each feature in the structure has been the result of study and experiment, as when Huyghens hung the pendulum from a separate point and connected it with a forked crank astride the pendulum shaft. You can see that forked crank to this day, if you care to look; it was the product of good Dutch brains.

Next we come to one of the greatest single improvements in clock-work, and the chief difference between the mechanism made by de Vick and the better ones of our own time. When the pallets in a clock are forced by an increased swing of the pendulum or by the form of the pallet faces against the teeth of the escape-wheel in the direction opposite to that in which the wheel is moving, the wheel must be pushed backward a little way each time, and the whole clock action is made to back up a little. You can see that this would tend to interfere with good and regular timekeeping. George Graham, in London, in 1690 corrected this error by inventing the dead-beat escapement which rather contradicted its name by working very well and faithfully.

There are many forms of this escapement and there is no need to explain it in detail. But the main idea is this: At the end of each vibration or swing of the pendulum, the escape-teeth, instead of being made to recoil by the downward motion of the pallets, simply remains stationary or at rest until the commencement of the return swing of the pendulum. This was brought about by applying certain curves to the acting faces of the pallets. But the acting faces of both tooth and pallet are beveled, so that the tooth in slipping by gives the pallet a "kick" or impulse outward and keeps it in motion. Nowadays, even a common alarm-clock has an escapement working in this way.

Then came another remarkably interesting contribution. Have you ever wondered why the pendulums of fine clocks were weighted with a gridiron of alternate rods of brass and steel? For purpose of ornament? Not at all – it constitutes a scientific solution of an embarrasing problem, due to the inevitable variations in temperature. Metals expand with heat and contract with cold. Notched iron bars can be made to "crawl" along a flat surface by alternately heating and cooling them. Bridge-builders sometimes arrange sliding points, or rocking points to adjust the differences in the length of the steel. Contraction and expansion are important factors in all their calculations. But a pendulum would change its rate of motion if it changed its length and this would interfere with its accuracy as a measurer of time. Graham worked upon this problem, too, and attached a jar of mercury to the rod of his pendulum for a weight. When the heat lengthened the rod, it also caused the mercury to rise, just as in a thermometer, and this left the "working-length" the same.

Such mercury-weighted pendulums are not uncommon to this day, but the more familiar gridiron came from the brain of John Harrison, who, in 1726, fixed the alternate rods in such a way that the expanding brass rods raised the weight as much as the expanding steel rods lowered it. Thus they neutralized each other.

The clock as we know it was now virtually complete. There were structural refinements, but no more radical improvements to be made. In tracing its development from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, we note one curious likeness to the ancient history of recorded time. In this case, as before in Babylon, the people first concerned with the science were the priests, and after them the astronomers, but we note a still more important difference.

As the medieval passed into the modern, the practise of horology passed more and more out of the hands of scientists into the keeping of commercial workmen. The custodian of time was at first a priest, and finally a manufacturer. And this change was attended by a vast increase in the general use of timepieces, and the correspondingly greater influence of time upon society and men's way of living. The Middle Ages made clocks and watches; and clocks and watches make the age in which we live.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The Watch that Was Hatched from the "Nuremburg Egg"

In the second act of Shakespeare's play, As You Like It, when Touchstone, the fool, meets Jaques, the sage, he draws forth a sun-dial from his pocket and begins to moralize upon Time.

Touchstone's dial must have looked like a napkin-ring, with a stem like that of a watch, by which to hold it up edgewise toward the sun, and a tiny hole in the upper part of the ring through which a little sunbeam could fall upon the inner surface whereon the hours were marked. This pinhole was perhaps pierced through a slide, which could be adjusted up or down according to the sun's position at the time of year. In principle, therefore, it was a miniature of the huge dial of Ahaz of more than two thousand years before.

In another Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, Malvolio is gloating in imagination over his coming luxury when he shall have married the heiress and entered upon a life of wealth and leisure.

"I frown the while," says he; "and perchance wind up my watch, or play with my – some rich jewel."

There, in those two quotations, we have the whole meaning of the watch in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Touchstone's dial was a practical convenience – a thing to tell the time. Malvolio's watch was a piece of jewelry, an ornament indicating wealth and splendor. While watches had been well known for many years, people wore them chiefly for display and told time by means of pocket sun-dials.

For the first watches we must go back to about the year 1500, shortly after America had been discovered, and when the great tower-clocks of de Vick and Lightfoot were not much more than a century old. In the quaint old town of Nuremberg there lived, at that time, one Peter Henlein, probably a locksmith. But a locksmith, in those days, would be an expert mechanic – more like a modern toolmaker; very likely an armorer also; capable of that fine workmanship in metal which we still wonder at in our museums. Nuremberg was then very much a medieval city, all red-tiled roofs and queer windows, where people went about dressed in trunks and jerkins and pointed caps and pointed shoes. It looked like Die Meistersinger, and Grimm's Fairy Tales, and pictures by Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish; very much like "Spotless Town," except that it was far from spotless.

Now, as you remember, there was not until long after this any means of making clocks keep anything like accurate time; so, instead of improving them, people competed with each other in devising novel and ingenious forms. There could be no more desirable novelty than a clock small enough to stand upon a desk or table, or even to be carried around. Such a clock could not well be driven by weights. But Peter Henlein overcame that difficulty by using for the motive power a coiled mainspring wound up with a ratchet, just as we still do to-day.

There is some dispute over attributing to Henlein the credit for this invention; but at least he did the thing, and it cannot be proved that anybody did it before him. "Every day," wrote Johannes Coeuleus, in 1511, "produces more ingenious inventions. A clever and comparatively young man – Peter Henlein – creates works that are the admiration of leading mathematicians, for, out of a little iron he constructs clocks with numerous wheels, which, without any impulse and in any position, indicate time for forty hours and strike, and which can be carried in the purse as well as in the pocket."

There was, however, no invention of any such thing as we mean by the term watch to-day that came complete from the mind of any one man, but the contrivance gradually grew, in shape and structure out of the small clock which could be worn at the belt or on a chain round the neck. It came to be called a watch because clock meant a bell that struck the hours. But many of the first watches had striking apparatus, and this circumstance added to the confusion of names. We slangily call a fat, old-fashioned watch a turnip; but the first watches were very much fatter and more old-fashioned, and might fairly have deserved the name. Before long, Henlein was making them oval in shape. Hence, they were called Nuremberg eggs.

Here, then, is something which we can really consider a watch. Let us see how it compares with those that we know to-day. In the first place, being egg-shaped, it was thick and heavy – you would not like to carry it in your pocket. It had no crystal and only one hand – the hour-hand. So much for the outside.

Inside, the difference was still greater. The works were made of iron and put together with pins and rivets. It was all hand-work – expert workmanship, indeed – but look at the works of your own watch and try to imagine cutting the teeth in those tiny gears, or making those delicate springs with files and hammers. As pieces of hand-workmanship, therefore, the watches made by Henlein and his followers were remarkable; but when compared with our modern watches, they were crude and clumsy affairs.

Furthermore, they were poor timekeepers. They had the old foliot balance running parallel to the dial. This was all very well as long as the watch lay on the table with the balance swinging horizontally. But as soon as it was carried, in a perpendicular position, the arms of the balance had to swing up and down, which was quite another matter. And then, of course, the crudeness of the works produced a great deal of friction. This made it necessary to use a very stiff mainspring, otherwise the watch would not run at all. Such a spring exercised more pressure when fully wound than when it was nearly run down. And so the worst fault of the foliot was that it speeded up under increased pressure.

The first improvements, and, in fact, the only ones for nearly two hundred years, were directed toward doing away with the unequal pressure of the mainspring and thus make the watch keep better time. If you look into the back of a very early watch, you may see a curious device consisting of a curved arm ending in a pinion, which travels round an eccentric gear of peculiar shape. This is the first type of equalizing mechanism; it was invented in Peter Henlein's time and was called the stackfreed; but it was a clumsy device at best and a great waste of power. Therefore it was gradually displaced by the fusee.

Perhaps one might have felt a certain amount of pride in carrying about such a thick, bulging mechanical toy, as were these early watches, but, as to possessing something that would keep correct time – that was a different matter. After admiring it and listening to its ticking, one would have to guess as to just how far wrong it might be. People did not figure closely on minutes and half minutes in the day of the Nuremberg egg; there was no "Wall Street" and no commuting. And this brings us to a real event in the whole story.

Jacob Zech, a Swiss mechanic, living at Prague in Bohemia, Austria, about 1525, began studying the problem of the equalization of watch mechanism. He was sure that there ought to be some better means than that of the clumsy stackfreed. Presently he hit upon the principle of the fusee, and Gruet, another Swiss, perfected it. At last it became possible to make a watch that would not run fast when first wound and then go more and more slowly as it ran down – and to do this in a really practical way. Before this time, a watch was a clumsy piece of ticking jewelry; now it became something of a real time-keeper. Therefore, it was not long before people began to want Swiss watches. These were the days when skilful Swiss craftsmen worked patiently in their little home shops, making some single watch-part and making it extremely well, while the so-called "manufacturer" bought up these separate parts, and assembled them into watches.

What was the fusee that brought about such a change? Not much to look at, surely – merely a short cone with a spiral groove running about it, and a cord, or chain, wound in this groove and fastened at the large end of the core. Its principle and its action were very simple, and that is why it was a great invention. Some one has said that anyone can invent a complicated machine to do a piece of work, but it takes real brains to make a simple machine that will do the same work.

The shaft of the fusee was attached to the great wheel which drove the gears, and the other end of the cord was fastened to the mainspring barrel. This is the way in which it worked: The mainspring slowly turned the barrel; this gradually unwound the cord from the fusee and caused the fusee to turn. When the fusee turned, the wheels also were forced to turn, and the watch was running. At the start, the cord would unwind from the small end where the leverage was least, but as the tension of the mainspring grew slowly less, the leverage of the cord grew slowly greater and, consequently, the power applied to the wheels was always of the same degree of strength. This invention gave a great impulse to Swiss watchmaking; several centuries later it worked to the disadvantage of English manufacturers, for they continued to use it after other countries had found still better methods of power equalization.

The fusee was invented about the year 1525, at a time when the world was fairly alive with new ideas. People in Europe were just beginning to realize that they were living on a sphere and not upon a flat surface, and that there was a vast new land on the other side of the ocean. Columbus had crossed the Atlantic but a few years before and now explorers were making new voyages of discovery in every direction.

Printing, invented by Gutenberg, about a century before, was becoming common enough to be a real power in the world, bringing the thoughts of men before the eyes of thousands without the slow and expensive process of hand-copying. The first printed copy of the Bible had made its appearance and Caxton had set up his first printing-press – all within the lifetime of people then living – and printing shops were being established in many places. Many people were learning to read – a thing that could be said of very few in the Middle Ages. They were finding out something about the wonderful forgotten civilization of ancient times. Everywhere people's minds were stirring. We call it the time of the Renaissance, or the rebirth of civilization, but in some respects it was more like the awakening of the world after a long sleep. Just as a person on waking looks first at his clock or watch, so now the world, preparing to be busy and modern, needed some better means of telling time. It therefore was both natural and necessary that the watch should have received such a great improvement as the fusee at just this period.

Then began the age of those strange, ingenious watches which we still find in the museums. For some time, there were only a few real improvements. Screws and brass wheels were introduced into their construction about 1550, and glass crystals about 1600. The minute-hand appeared occasionally; but it was not in common use for nearly a century afterward. And that shows how watches were regarded in those days. One would think that such an obvious advantage as that of minute-notation would have been seized upon and utilized at once; on the contrary, people did not seem to care much about it. What was the use of a hand to mark the minutes, when the watch was more likely than not to be half an hour or so in error?

For real timekeeping there were dials everywhere, and there were also fairly good clocks in the towers; at night, watchmen patrolled the streets and called out the hours. These watchmen were the police of the period; it was part of their duty to call out the time, just as the modern police direct people upon the way they wish to go. For timekeeping, the watch was still less useful than the watchman. Made entirely by hand, it was necessarily expensive; therefore, it was made regardless of expense. It was thought of as Malvolio thought of it – a possession showing the wealth and station of the wearer, a rich jewel, a toy for noblemen and for kings. Centuries were to pass before real watches were within the reach of common people.

It is said that Edward VI was the first Englishman to possess a watch. This young king, who reigned so short a time, will be remembered by many as the young prince in Mark Twain's famous story The Prince and the Pauper. Mary Queen of Scots had a small watch shaped like a skull – a cheerful fashion of the time. Many others were shaped in the form of insects, flowers, animals, and various other objects. Even to-day the Swiss make many watches of curious form.

Queen Elizabeth and her court selected watches as modern women do their hats – to match their various costumes. These watches were usually worn on a chain or ribbon round the neck and were largely for display. Several outside cases were often supplied with watches of that period, and they were made to fit on over that which held the works; these were variously ornamented with jewels, tortoise-shell and intricate pierced work in gold, almost as delicate as lace. The covers were decorated with miniature paintings, some of which were very beautiful.

Strangely enough, it was this practise of decorating watches that later gave us our plain white enameled dials, because enamel was the best material on which to paint delicately. To the average museum visitor, the interest in any collection of old watches, aside from their historic association, lies in their marvelously ornamented cases rather than in their mechanism. And in this he very closely repeats the feeling of their original makers or owners; it was more important to follow fashion than to know the time.

This custom of watch-decoration continued more or less through the eighteenth century, and even into the nineteenth, although, by that time, watches had, as we shall see, become excellent timepieces. The story is told that when Dresden was captured by the Prussians in 1757, they found in the wardrobe of Count Bruhl, the Saxon Minister, a different suit of clothes for every day in the year; each had a watch, stick, and snuff-box, appropriately decorated, as part of each one.

Shakespeare never regarded a watch seriously. In Love's Labour's Lost he compares a woman to

 
A German clock,
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch —
 

A century after Shakespeare's day, Doctor Johnson remarked that a dictionary was like a watch: "The worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true." And Pope says in the same vein:

 
'Tis with our judgments as our watches – none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
 

All of this reminds one of Dickens' famous character, Cap'n Cuttle, whose watch was evidently of the old school. Readers of Dombey and Son may remember how "the Captain drew Walter into a corner, and with a great effort, that made his face very red, pulled up the silver watch, which was so big and so tight in his pocket that it came out like a bung. "Wal'r," said the Captain, handing it over and shaking him heartily by the hand, "a parting gift, my lad. Put it back half an hour every morning and another quarter toward afternoon and it's a watch that'll do you credit.""

The old idea of regarding the watch as a trinket rather than as a timepiece, as an expensive toy rather than as an accurate and necessary mechanism, has come down to us from the days when a watch was ornamented outside, because it could not be really useful within. Even now, in spite of the modern demand for accurate timekeeping, that attitude has not entirely died away, as is shown by the expression "gold watch" and "silver watch." Of course, there are really no such things; there are merely gold and silver cases for steel, brass and nickel watches. Some people still continue this mistaken idea by thinking of a watch merely as jewelry, as a thing meant more for ornament than for use.