^ "Burning the candle at both ends" must have been a vivid phrase in 875 A. D.
^*when this Candle Clock was invented by King Alfred the Great of England. It told
time by burning through one marked inch on the candle every twenty mimites.
How long is a minute?
Search your own experi
ences and you will certainly
find examples of "long” and
"short” minutes. Did that
minute in the dentist’s chair
go as quickly as the minute
at the soda fountain? You
wish it did, but it didn’t.
This brief test shows a per
son’s own conception of time’s
passage is not always reliable.
If time, as the textbooks say,
is measured duration, we are
faced with the problem of
how to measure it.
j No one is quite sure just
when man began to mark off
- J Father Time’s steps — some
' .|| say it all started about 6190
ago back in ancient
*' Fgypf—but it is a good guess
that our earliest ancestors took advantage of that
greatest of all time pieces, the sun, 93,000,000
miles away from them. By the shadows it cast
along familiar landmarks, the caveman probably
marked the passing of his day. So were formed
the crude beginnings of the sundial which, for
most of us today, is merely a garden ornament.
In less^sunny climates, other methods had to be
devised to tell the passage of time. These included
candles marked to tell the hour being melted away.
Burning candles being too inconvenient to carry
in their pockets, our forefathers also developed the
portable hour glass in which the sands of time
flowed so swiftly.
None of these, obviously, was of a mechanical
nature. It is believed that a mechanical time piece
with gear wheels was invented by Ctesibus, an
Alexandrian, about 140 years before the birth of
Christ. This was a development of the Clepsydra—
meaning Water Stealer—which started out merely
as a vessel from which water dripped slowly
through a hole while the gradually lowered level
inside the jar measured time against a scale marked
off on the vessel’s side.
Eventually, with the gear wheels of Ctesibus
and a twelve-hour circular face, the Water Steal
er came to look very much like a modern clock.
The Romans used them both as household and
commercial time pieces, and they were official
timers in the Roman Senate. One of the tasks of
Senate attendants was to keep an eye on those
clocks which timed the speakers who held forth
before the Senate. Since time allotted each speak
er was strictly limited, it was the practice of some
of these early politicians to secretly add mud or
oil to the clock water to slow its dripping rate,
thereby giving them more speaking time. Fili-
bust'cring, as this shows, is no modern invention.
The next stage in clock development was the
substitution of weights for water power to move
the pulley and gear attachments of the Water
Stealers. The force of weights caused an iron bar
to move from side to side, turning the gear wheels
and moving the time indicator. The need for ac
curate time and less cumbersome time pieces led
to the development of improved escapements and
eventually the mainspring.
The pendulum of Galileo and the dead-beat
escapement, developed by the English astronomer
George Graham, improved the time pieces of
their day. Through the years one improvement led
to another, and by 1800 the entire foundation of
our modern time piece was laid.
When clocks became smaller, it was the custom
of the town watchmen to cry the hours to the
good citizens of the town who did not possess time
pieces. We have left the town crier behind, but
his name has been given to the small clock most
of us carry today—the watch.
With the increased use of clocks, necessitated
by greater commercial and scientific activities, a
vital need developed for establishing a time stand
ard to give a positive measure of time for the
clocks throughout the world. The fixed stars have
long held top place in providing this positive
measure of Mother Earth’s rotation. By checking
this rotation with one of those distant, great flam
ing suns which are so deep in the heavens that,
to us, they appear as points of light, we are pro
vided with time accurately computed to a hun
dredth of a second. This checking is done at the
U. S. Naval Observatory just outside of Washine-
ton, D. C.
All of us are aware that the need for accurate
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