Introduction

History is a great chronology set upon one continuous timeline. But the history of the concept of time is a curious one. The task of defining time becomes difficult as soon as one begins. As Saint Augustine wrote in 567 A.D., “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not”.[1] 

Clocks explain what time it is, not what time is. Yet humans seem to understand it intuitively at an instinctive level, yet fail to define at a linguistic level. It’s an invisible and constantly flowing, yet rigid force. And despite not having defined it once and for all, the concept of time has always been significant to humans. Though it’s hard to determine whether the desire to be time-conscious preceded the clock or if the clock drove the desire, the desire to tell time and to establish a sense of temporal order remains undisputed.

Ding! The alarm. It’s the first thing many people hear in the morning. Although its dizzying ring rouses resentment in many, the function it serves is invaluable. Creating and maintaining a productive schedule and routine is a necessity of modern life. In order to wake up, pre-modern humans relied on sunlight, rooster crows and the eager banter and bustling about of children. In the twenty-first century, however, it takes one tap on a smartphone to set an alarm. Preceding the alarm function, however, was the ability to keep the time by which an alarm can be set.

Enter, the mechanical clock.

For society to be ordered, time-conscious and productive, the individuals within that society must be able to keep time for themselves consistent with the time kept by others. This condition is met today by smartphones, watches and even smartwatches. However, time wasn’t always easy to keep nor as important as it is today. To some, the time-intensive modern way of life seems to have become a necessary evil, but to mankind, it has unquestionably provided the temporal framework upon which humanity has most ably thrived. This paper aims to detail major shifts in time-consciousness, the development of more portable timekeeping devices and how these two aspects related to time provide a better understanding of the contemporary notion of time.

Time Reckoning and Time-Consciousness Before the Mechanical Clock

The idea of the ‘hour’ has existed for centuries, but it wasn’t until the mechanical clock that time-by-the-hour began to take hold in society. The ‘hour’ as a unit of time fluctuated over the years depending on the most prevalent time-keeping method of the day. Sundials, candles, water-clocks – each invented with the aim to more accurately and reliably measure time. The desire for a smaller, more precise unit of time than a long, nebulous ‘day’ brought us the hour. But before getting to the ‘hour,’ let’s first address the day.

At present, people perceive one ‘day’ to equate to one 24-hour period that consists of daytime and nighttime. This was much different in ancient times. As Jo Ellen Barnett notes in Time’s Pendulum, “primitive humankind regarded night and day as fundamentally different phenomena and didn’t fuse them together into a single unit.”[2] It wasn’t until centuries later that the ‘day’ was considered to be the duration from one midnight to the next.

The sundial was the most widely adopted time-indicating device before mechanical clocks. However ingenious this ‘stick-in-the-mud’ technology turned out to be, there was a major problem: the length of a day depends on the duration of sunlight which changes through the year as the Earth orbits the sun. And because Earth orbits at a 23.4º tilt, the amount of sunlight and duration of the day vary, not just from one side of Earth to the other, but from the North to the South pole. Meaning an hour, as measured by a sundial, during winter is much shorter than an hour in summer. And because the sundial based its hours on an equal division of sunlight and not on Earth’s revolution around its own axis, winter hours were much shorter than summer hours given that winter days have a shorter duration of sunlight[3]. Additionally, sundials only work if there’s sunlight to create a shadow on the dial. Sundials only work during the day, and only if it isn’t overcast or cloudy. This limitation to the sunlit hours led to the invention of other devices that could measure hours throughout the night.

Water clocks and candles were supposed to do what sundial couldn’t: keep time during the night. Both methods were faulty. Water clocks rely on having the same amount of water to tell time, but the amount of water never stays the same because water freezes in cold climates and evaporates in warmer climates.[4] The candle as an alternative was no more promising. Pioneered in the 11th century by the Chinese Sung Dynasty, candles were used to track the passing of time by burning candles of equal diameter with lines indicating the hours. Because someone had to frequently relight more candles to keep the time going, the candle as a clock ultimately failed to satisfy the deep desire for time-consciousness. Both methods were useful for measuring short periods of time, but the search for a universal measurement of time remained. The unit couldn’t be based on inconsistent sunlight. It needed to be based on something that’s the same across the world – the Earth’s rotation around its axis.

The Development and Miniaturization of the Mechanical Clock

The earliest sketch of a mechanical clock was found in the manuscripts of Giovanni de’ Dondi of Padua in 1364. The drawing is of a hexagonal contraption roughly two feet in height.[5] Though it was never built, drawings and models of similar devices were rampant for the next few centuries. Unsurprisingly, mechanical timekeepers became more accurate, reliable and, most of all, portable. Early mechanical clocks were large and expensive. Most of the people who could afford them were wealthy or noble and wanted clocks for status-symbols in their homes. The wealthiest also traveled the most and there began to be a market for portable clocks. There were even kings with designated “clock-carriers” for travel purposes.[6] Whether it was to quench the nobles’ desires for portable clocks or the drive of an increasingly capitalistic mentality toward time as a means to productivity, the Middle Ages saw the mechanical clock go from being the size of a chair to the size of a hamburger.

One of the innovations that made this possible is the fusée.[7] The fusée is, “shaped like a truncated cone with spiral grooves which hold a cord in a place around it.”[8] Despite many efforts, it’s unknown when it was first used or who did it. In combination with a mainspring, the fusée powers a clock with the uncoiling force of the mainspring, as opposed to the force produced by the swinging weight in a pendulum clock. Pendulum clocks weren’t portable at all. Clocks with the fusée and spring mechanism, however, were more accurate and smaller. Before the fusée, the movement of choice was the verge and foliot escapement, another weight-driven movement. It has two perpendicular parts that prohibit clocks that use them from being as small as those with the fusée. Moreover, metalworking tools had become more specialized and were able to produce even thinner fusées.[9] The fusée helped take the clock from a tabletop status symbol to a tool in one’s pocket. Essentially, the fusée made clocks much thinner, smaller and transportable. By the 16th century, “the miniaturization of clocks became a fashionable trend,” and the production of small timekeepers was rapidly increasing.[10] Compared to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the number, owner description, transportability and size of mechanical clocks by the 1520s had made huge improvements.

Time-Consciousness from 1350-1550

Monasteries were the spiritual enclaves where pious monks could retreat to live a life devoid of worldly temptations and in accordance with God’s will. Monks had strict routines with serious religious implications. One such routine was to recite certain prayers at different times throughout the day. Before the mechanical clock, this was based on the hours of sundials. Bells were rung when it was time for the next prayer and monks and citizens alike would refer to The Book of Hours, “the best-selling text of the later Middle Ages,” which had the times and corresponding prayers that were to be said.[11] The regimented monastic life, intended solely for religious reasons, gradually expanded temporal awareness and the significance of time outside the monastery walls. This hours-based system enveloped people, “just as profoundly as did the ecclesiastical activities,” of the Church.[12] A mostly religious Europe was transformed by the temporal awareness that began in monasteries.

Similar effects followed the surge in the number of public clocks. Throughout the 14th century, cities began installing public clocks in their town centers. Large, centrally located clocks were hugely beneficial for local business and trade. Many of the earliest installations were paid for by nobility who saw it as a way to portrait their town as wealthy, urban and sophisticated. Gerard Dohrn-van Rossum writes in History of the Hour that he sees, “the acquisition of public clocks by ‘modern princes and progressive city administrators’ as a sign of the level of mercantile rationality attained.”[13] However, getting a public clock was difficult as there were only so many master clockmakers capable of building them and the high demand of the day. It took more than a master clockmaker to complete a clock tower. To install a public clock, between 50-100 workers would be needed: carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, etc.[14] These clocks were also incredibly finicky and often broke which required more attention from clock-makers. Despite the costs, there was a marked surge in the devotion of resources toward horology in the late 1300s. Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, new public clocks dotted the landscape of the innumerable cities, fiefdoms and kingdoms across Europe. The race against the clock for the clock led to the dominance of the hours of the mechanical clock which were equal regardless of season or sunlight.

The Foundation and Status of Contemporary Time Consciousness

The time-consciousness of humanity has come a long way. From seasons and days to nanoseconds, humans have what seems to be an insatiable desire to measure, track and coordinate. Twenty-first-century humans plan their days down to the minute. As time has become more quantifiable, reliable, universal and precise, the conception of time has adjusted accordingly.

Humans began their time-quantifying quest with the light and darkness of the day and the night. Then as agriculture became more a part of life, seasons based on harvest cycles became another prevalent axis about which to understand time. Humans later created hours to divide their days up into more useful shorter units.

Some have said that humans invented the clock and have since become slaves to their own invention. Every aspect of contemporary life seems to be dictated by the next tick or tock. But I don’t see it quite like that. The more humans have lived by the clock, the more control they have had over their time. Much like the heart powering a body with a steady beat, the clock powers the modern world. Since the widespread use of the mechanical clock, business has become more global, organized and efficient thanks to more accurate feedback loops and clearer deadlines for actions and coordination.

Moreover, innovation in other technological disciplines has also greatly altered the global temporal order. For instance, modern travel times are fractions of what they used to be. In everyday life before the Industrial Revolution, people either walked or rode animals to get around. After the Industrial Revolution, trains, and later automobiles, made long-distance travel wildly faster. Trains, cars, and airplanes were revolutionary in that they shortened our perceptions of distance. The world grows smaller with the passing of each century because the amount of time it takes to go places – local or distant – has become much smaller. This example shows that time affects our perception of other dimensions like size and distance.

Nevertheless, the impact of shifts in time-consciousness throughout history is yet to be fully understood. Humans wanted a way to measure the mysterious yet familiar phenomenon called time. In devising mechanisms and equations with which to measure time, humans began living by the clock with an ever-greater closeness. Now humans and time exist in a ruthless union, wherein humans seek to find a balance between the demands of work and the delights of leisure and one another. The complete effect of time-consciousness on humanity is unknown. But as they say, only time will tell.

References

1. Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, and R. S. Pine-Coffin. 1961. Confessions. London: Penguin Classics. 155.

2. Barnett, Jo Ellen. 1999. Time’s Pendulum: From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, the Fascinating History of Timekeeping and How Our Discoveries Changed the World. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. 23.

3. Ibid., 19.

4. Ibid., 25.

5. Landes, Davis S. 1983. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: The Belknap Press. 236-237.

6. Ibid., 118-120.

7. Ibid., 236-237.

8. Cipolla, Carlo M. 1967. Clocks and Culture. London, Collins. 121-124.

9. Rossum, G. Dohrn-van, and T. Dunlap. History of the Hour. 120-123.

10. Ibid., 121-123.

11. Barnett, Jo Ellen. Time’s Pendulum, 39.

12. Ibid., 33-37.

13. Rossum, Gerhard Dohrn-van, and Thomas Dunlap. 1996. History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 125-127.

14. Landes, Davis S. Revolution in Time, 191-200.