How Humans Kept Time with a History of Clocks

Almost every animal keeps some sort of schedule, albeit a very basic one. Nocturnal animals sleep during the day and hunt and play during the night while diurnal creatures sleep during the night (like humans for example). However, once humans began to create civilizations thousands of years ago, their desire for order required more punctuality than biology allows, and the history of clocks began.

One of the Oldest Tools

The history of clocks stretches back many millennia. Earth’s sun is pretty much a constant tool that humans are just now beginning to utilize vigorously with tools such as solar panels to generate electricity, but an ancient people used the sun as early as 5500 years ago. Egyptians built obelisks as a sort of giant sundial, and the shadows that it created under the sun’s glare allowed users to read time. Another creative time measuring device was the water clock, which measured the flow of water into or out of a vessel. While sundials were only useful during the day, water clocks were useful all the time.

By about 800 C.E., the first mechanical clocks began to appear. Thus the history of clocks really began to unfold as new innovations were often being introduced to make these clocks more accurate. Truthfully, the sundials and water clocks were more accurate than the early mechanical clocks while often being smaller, but mechanical clocks soon proved to be superior by having no mess (water clocks could leak and had to be refilled) and working all the time (sundials don’t work on cloudy days and during the night).

Over the coming centuries, new inventions advanced clocks to smaller sizes and more precise measurements of time in the history of clocks. Bells allowed whole towns to be notified of the time from a single clock, most often in a church tower, and springs vastly increased their accuracy. Pendulums were better yet, requiring daily upkeep to operate but allowing the constant of Earth’s gravity to achieve unprecedented accuracy. Over the next few hundred years, minor modifications were added that slightly increased their efficiency and accuracy, but none were as big as the microchip which would forever revolutionize clocks.

The microchip burst forward the history of clocks by hundreds of years. In a matter of months, consumers were able to plug digital clocks into any electrical outlet and receive an easy to read display that could accurately keep time without any user interaction. In all of the history of clocks, no invention was nearly as important to keeping accurate time.