From: cozzlab@garnet.berkeley.edu ()
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: "period" wristwatches
Date: 12 Nov 1992 17:46:28 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: garnet.berkeley.edu

In article <BxLor9.HKC@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> guth@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (G.Guth) writes:
"On the topic of telling the time, just when were the first pocket watches
"made?  I have a feeling that they, in their earliest forms, are not too
"OOP.

The Nuremberg Egg, the first pocket watches, were fifteenth-century I
believe.  Several are on display at the California Academy of Sciences
in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.  I haven't been there in a good while,
so take that date with a grain of salt.
"
"Which leads to another question...how did ladies and gentlemen of means
"tell time in period?  I'm especially interested in late period.  Was it
"sundials all the way through?

Okay, in _late_ period you told time by the town clock, which rang a bell
or bells every hour, eventually every half- and quarter-hour.  Or you looked
at your Nuremberg egg, if you were rich enough to have one.  (They were
the cellular phone of their day.)  Or you listened for the bells from
the nearby monastery, which rang every three hours and gave you an idea
that was good enough for all practical purposes (until the town clock
started giving people this pernicious modern idea of being *on*time*
to the hour, quarter hour, and eventually minute.)

(The earliest town clocks were twenty-four-hour and had only an hour hand.)

Or, if you weren't in a town and the nearest monastery was out of earshot,
you squinted at the sun and guessed you had three or four hours before
dinnertime.  Or, as the sun set, you squinted again, holding your hand
fesswise at arm's length, and seeing that the distance between the bottom
of the sun and the horizon was two fingersbreadths, you knew you had half
an hour to get home before sundown.  (_Practical_ local sundown, in terms
of its getting dark, is when the sun disappears--whether it goes behind
the "real" horizon at sea or behind the local tallish mountain.)

And how did they know in the monastery when to ring their bells?  By the
same method--or by looking at the stars the same way you looked at the
sun (astronomy was taught in the monasteries, so you could keep track
of the hours and days).  Or by using clock-candles, marked off in hori-
zontal stripes.  Or by using a water clock.  These came in around the
twelfth century, if my memory serves.  James Burke, in his TV series
and book _Connections,_ quotes a monastic chronicle, "on such and such
a day the church caught fire, and some of us ran to the well, and some
to the clock, for water to put it out...."  He also found in another
manuscript a description of how to build a water-driven alarm clock,
and his staff built a model and it worked.  

You have a regulated flow (drip, rather) of water into a tank, and a piece
of wood floating in the tank, which when it rises high enough knocks a
wedge out and releases a weight, tied to a string, wound around a cylinder
which revolves as the weight falls, and a striker attached to the cylinder
hits a bell ten or twelve times before the weight reaches the ground.
DING DING DING DING DING DING! -- waking up the brother whose job it is
to get everybody up at 3 a.m. for Matins and Lauds.

This kind of clock is described in Dante's _Paradiso,_ written about
1315.  Dante is traveling through Heaven and has been talking to twenty-
four saints who look like bright stars arranged in two concentric
circles, one revolving clockwise and one counterclockwise, singing as
they go.  And to describe them, he says, "Just as a clock, when the
hour comes to call the bride of God [the Church] to sing matins to
her Bridegroom, revolving and singing "tin tin" so sweetly...."

The first, and undoubtedly the last, poem in praise of an alarm clock
that gets you up at three o'clock in the morning.


Dorothea of Caer-Myrddin                               Dorothy J. Heydt
Mists/Mists/West                                              Albany CA
Argent, a cross forme'e sable

Disclaimer: This is the Cozzarelli Lab's account, not mine--but I don't
think anybody else ever reads it.