The Desire to Measure Time — How Humanity Came to Own the Hours

We glance down at the dial on our wrist many times a day. Within that small circle, the hands keep marking the hours without hesitation. Yet if we pause to think, it is a strange thing. Time itself is invisible; it cannot be touched by hand. And still, over a span of time so long it dizzies the mind, humanity has worked to lock that ‘invisible thing’ inside a machine and translate it into the movement of hands. The wish to measure time, to keep time close at hand — that plain and stubborn desire was the first spark that would later give rise to the vast world of fine watchmaking. This series is a ten-part story of how that spark spread into flame.

The Sound of the Bell Told the Town the Time

The oldest ancestors of the clock were the sundial, which read the shadow of the sun, and the water clock, which measured the flow of water. But shadows vanished on cloudy days, and water could not be relied upon in freezing winters. What people truly wanted was a mechanism that, unaffected by weather or by day and night, would keep marking the hours with steady regularity. The answer was the mechanical clock, which used the force of a falling weight as its power. The force of a weight hung on a chain, slowly descending, was transmitted through gears to the hands or to a bell — this prototype is thought to have begun appearing in Europe around the end of the thirteenth century.

The earliest mechanical clocks had no dial like the ones we know today. Their role was chiefly to ring a bell at appointed hours. In monasteries the tower bell announced the hours of prayer; in cities it announced the opening of the market and the start of work, ringing out across the whole town. A clock is said to have been set in Salisbury Cathedral in England in 1386, and this dial-less clock is known as one of the oldest mechanical clocks still in operation today. Time was not yet a private possession. It was the sound of the community’s bell, pouring down over the whole town from atop the tower.

The Escapement — The Heart of the Clock Is Born

Simply transmitting the force of the weight to the gears was not enough to make a clock usable. The weight would fall all at once, and the gears would spin themselves out at a furious speed. There had to be a mechanism that ‘released’ this wild force little by little, at a fixed rhythm. That mechanism is the escapement. The escapement stops and then frees the rotation of the gears at regular intervals — click, click — converting stored force into even increments. By this means, the rough energy of a falling weight was tamed into the regular stride of time.

The method used in the medieval European tower clock was called the verge escapement. A crown-shaped gear is caught alternately by a horizontal bar (the foliot) swinging left and right, generating the tempo that marks time. The mechanism was simple and not highly accurate, but this escapement became the foundation of every mechanical clock that followed. Without the invention of the escapement, neither the pocket watch nor the wristwatch that came later could ever have been born — in the history of timekeeping, this was the birth of the heart itself.

The seventeenth-century scientist Christiaan Huygens made the clock far cleverer still. Around 1656 he is said to have applied to the clock the property by which the swing of a pendulum marks a fixed rhythm, and to have put the pendulum clock into practical use. The error of clocks, which until then had drifted by more than ten minutes a day, is said to have shrunk all at once. Then, in 1675, he devised a balance wheel incorporating a fine spiral spring, the hairspring, opening the way to small clocks that could mark time accurately without relying on a pendulum. The obsession with accuracy had already, by this time, taken hold of people’s hearts.

The Mainspring Set the Clock Free From the Building

The clock powered by a falling weight had a decisive weakness. The weight had to hang down, and the moment the clock was tilted or carried, it would stop at once. It was precisely because it was fixed to a tower or a pillar that a clock could remain a clock. What cut this chain was the idea of using the force of an unwinding, wound-up mainspring as power. A mainspring does not care about orientation. With the power source now small and free, the clock could leave the building and at last descend into human hands.

A name that endures in the miniaturization of the spring-driven clock is Peter Henlein, a locksmith who worked in Nuremberg, Germany, in the early sixteenth century. The small cylindrical clock he made in the early 1500s is said to have run for a long time on a single winding. The charming egg-shaped pocket watch later came to be known as the ‘Nuremberg Egg’. That said, there are cautious views about the common claim that Henlein alone invented the spring-driven clock. Spring-driven clocks existed before him as well, and because the oldest surviving ‘egg’ is held to have been made after his death, the view that it is not Henlein’s work is also strong. It was likely the result of many craftsmen’s attempts overlapping, rather than the achievement of a single genius.

The Revolution of ‘Owning’ Time

The arrival of the pocket watch meant more than simply that the clock had grown small. The time announced by the tower bell was the same for everyone in the town — it belonged to the community. But the clock in the pocket was one’s own private time. People no longer had to wait for the bell to ring; they could now check the hour by their own will, whenever they wished. Time was moved from the town to the individual — a quiet yet immense revolution.

And the fact that not everyone could own a clock is indispensable to this story. An elaborately crafted portable timepiece was extraordinarily expensive, and only a handful of princes, nobles, and great merchants could wear one. The clock would in time be adorned with jewels and goldwork as an ornament hung from the neck. A tool that measured time accurately and at the same time an ornament that proclaimed wealth and status to those around — the two faces of ‘utility’ and ‘prestige’ that the later fine watch would come to bear were already sprouting in this age. The plain desire to measure time quietly transformed into the desire to own time and to take pride in it.

The craftsmen who would give form to that desire with the finest skill and persistence soon began to gather in one corner of Europe. When people driven out by the storms of religion carried their advanced techniques into a small country at the foot of the Alps, the center of the world’s watchmaking was set to shift greatly. Next time, we will trace the story of how Switzerland, the land of watches, was born.