Did you know that the invention of the clock dates back many centuries, and that it can be from sun, sand or water? Mechanical or electronic, or atomic?
Indeed, we have made use of everything in our power to know and measure time, an element that defines us as human.
Need for measure time: the invention of the clock
We tell you about the calendars, and how they were created by the need to mark the sowings, the crops and certain events related, of course, with agriculture.shortly, the human being needed more precise devices to measure the time that passed in his life, and I create the clepsidra , or the water clock.
The clepsydra was invented by the ancient Egyptians, and was used at night, when the sundial did not work.This "device" mediates time through the regulated flow of any ier liquid: it consisted of a ceramic vessel filled with water to a certain level, at the base of which there was a hole with a size that would ensure the exit of the liquid at a certain speed.Inside there were several marks that indicated the passage of the time.
Its antiquity dates back at least 3,500 years, and in Karnak, in the Temple of Amon, a water clock from the 14th century BC was found for many centuries was the most efficient instrument for measuring time In fact, the ancient Romans used clepsidras to regulate the speeches of the speakers.
The invention of the sundial was also of Egyptian invoice, as well as the division of the day in 23 hours and the year of 353 days.Remember that some calendars, in addition to marking agricultural landmarks, also served to mark religious events-as an example, note that the word corresponding to “hour,” for the Egyptians, was similarly equivalent to “priestly duty”-, so it was the priests who an they noticed the appearance of constellations or stars, called by them decan , on the horizon; each night had its corresponding decan, and thus divided the night into 12 decades of equal intervals.
More or less 1,500 years BC, in times of the pharaoh Thutmose III , designed a instrument that they named "sechat", which was a solar clock that mediates time by the length of the shadows.This little clock, which experts think that could even be portable by its dimensions , consisted of two pieces of stone, prismatic, three decimeters long, placed perpendicularly: one had the hours marked and the other served as a needle.
Sechat is particularly interesting, since in ancient times the instruments used to measure time did not usually be portable.For example, in Mesopotamia, the ziggurats (those t-shaped temples orre or stepped pyramid) helped count the hours by counting the rungs that were obscured by the shadow of their own edges.
Sundials are also called solar quadrants , and we find them in numerous places, although there is no doubt of their Babylonian, and Egyptian origin.
The invention of the hourglass arose in the mid-thirteenth century, and consists of two vessels of glass joined by a narrow bridge through which the sand located in one of them passes.It was very inaccurate, and currently its function is more ornamental.
The invention of the clock was key in many cultures, since ancient times until the Middle Ages, especially covering the Arabs and their astronomy.These Arab clocks-generally of the sun-, especially from the 10th century, are flat and built in marble or copper plates; there were no spherical elements and all, without exception, indicated the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca.
Remember that the Arabs, in that At the time, they undertook an incredible work of collecting ancient knowledge, and thanks to translations from Arabic, a huge “technological transfer” could be made that allowed great advances in the field of solar clocks, and then reached the weight and wheel clocks.
This type of watch was invented by the Benedictine monk Gerberto (future Pope Sylvester II) at the end of the 10th century, although it was known a little earlier in the Byzantine Empire, but others sources indicate that the first mechanical clock was built by Richard de Wallingford , abbot of San Albano, in 1326, because it seems that Gerberto was only a solar clock.The mechanical watches worked with weights that turned a crank.
From here they began to build large clocks that they placed in the towers of the churches: in Padua, in 1344, Santiago Dondis had the second built.The third was in the Louvre in Paris, which Charles V of France ordered to take from Germany.We could say that the extraordinary mechanism of Anticitera It is the ancestor of these clocks.
It was logical, at least in the Christian West, to place the mechanical clocks in the bell towers, in order to indicate the hours with the bells: this marked the calls to mass and various Prayers (like the Angelus ).In 1647, Christiaan Huygens applied the pendulum to the tower clocks, which allowed to gain in accuracy as the minute hand was added.
A revolutionary breakthrough was the invention of the pocket watch, made no less than in 1647 by Pedro Bell of Nuremberg .Hugens also applied to these clocks the spiral spring, and two years later, in 1649, the repetition clocks were invented.
The wristwatch was invented at the wish of the Queen of Naples, Maria Carolina of Austria, in 1812, and it was nothing more than a simple pocket watch mounted on a bracelet of precious stones and gold, but really those who invented this watch, also called wristwatch, were the Brazilian Alberto Santos Dumont and the frances Louis Cartier in 1901.The First World War was the impetus for its mass production, as they realized its extraordinary functionality; after the conflict, it was common to see men with these watches.
In 1929, the American Warren Albin Marrisson invented the quartz watch, then in 1957 the electric wristwatches came out , and nowadays you can find countless models and types of mechanical and digital watches for personal and general use.In many appliances there are electronic watches included.But the atomic clock is the most accurate built so far , and was developed by the US National Bureau of Standardization, NIST-F1, and has a margin of error of one second every 30 million years.
Incredible watch history jes, don't you think? Try reading the first clock that traveled to the Moon and those most peculiar in Europe.
Images: cea +, Maahmaah, Ludwig Borchardt, Mateo Vidal, Berthold Werner, Grufnik, Elliott Brown, Lee Jordan, Andres Stell, James Emery
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