A History of Clocks
Clocks have been around almost for since the dawn of time. It seems like these wonderful time keeping machines have been around for such a long time, but the first clocks appeared around the earth 5,500 years ago. The first versions were the well known sun dials, and these time keepers were used when the sun’s shadow would be projected down onto a flat base of stone, and a projecting arm would cause the shadow to fall on to the designated hour of time. For obvious reasons, these clocks only worked well during the day.
Before that, the sun’s position in the sky was used as a means to keep track of time. After that, Egyptians and Greeks used water dials to figure out what time it was. The Greeks worked on developing a time system, dividing up time into years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. From there, the history of clocks was changed, and people began to improve clocks. Before the pendulum clock, there were spring powered clocks. These were not very affective and did not catch on as well.
Clocks then started getting a minute hand, and after awhile, pendulum clocks ended up with a minute hand as well. It was soon after that pendulum clocks took on the full effect, with popular varieties such as the still popular grandfather clock. As the pendulum swings, teeth on a gear rotate, changing the gears and the hands on the clock. By 1906, these clocks had batteries, and were powered externally beforehand.
Because of the advances in time keeping, in 1884, people met from around the world and started to invent the time zones. This meant that international clocks and other kinds of time keeping can be perfected and restored to a level that would work for people worried about international time. It helped countries further develop train and bus schedules, so that people on the other side of the country or a state would not be confused by someone’s time. Since then, time keeping and clocks have advanced to include things like digital clocks and wall clocks like analog clocks. Even today, clock making and clocks go even further into the future.
