Sands of Time:
As stated in my last blog post I promised to begin discussing the material of my thesis and I figured that the best way would be to engage you all in dialogue on the construction of hourglasses. Yes, I know that seems mundane but let me explain further. 500 years ago the average person did not have a cell phone or a watch or a clock of their own. The vast majority of people on the planet still where pre-industrial agrarianists. They plotted time one a much simpler scale or ruler than we do today. They recorded time in months and seasons whose names we still have today which were tied directly to planting plus harvesting of crops or religious observances. Time 500 years ago was so heavily tied up with the spiritual that anything that threatened the collective spiritual experience was deemed monstrous. Case in point in 1535 when the king of Sweden instituted a tax on the church bells which called all people of his realm to communal prayer the people rose up in rebellion against him in the famous Church-bell Rebellion of that year. The church may be seen as repressive in today’s standards but while its minions were required to come and pray, these fixed meeting times brought people together beyond their day to day existence as agrarianists. It lead to discussions and friendships beyond family groups and helped stabilize entire communities giving temporal structure and meaning to peoples lives.
The church was not the repressive backwards institution that Monty Python or Black Adder would have us believe (although at times they were even too fundamentalists for my taste as a Lutheran). They in essence the keepers and holders of all worldly knowledge for over 1000 years, keeping in stasis the kernels of knowledge that ancient scientists had learned for the last 5000 years. Our calendar is not a manifestation of the supposed more advanced Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution, but is left over from the Roman Empire with functional vestiges within from the Greeks, Egyptians, and Chaldeans. The official timekeepers of the medieval church were no more advance than the sundials which can be found from every civilization from that of the ancient Egyptians (who constructed the mental concept of latitude due to their geographic distribution along the Nile) to the enigmatic people who constructed Stonehenge. The timekeeping ability of these devices (many of which can be seen on stones in and around churches of cathedrals dating from the 9th throught the 15th century) was dependent upon the season and the latitude of the place of meeting. It was the church with its collection of anal monks who were the keepers of the knowledge of the past who would rekindle ideas such as the hourglass to overcome the time problems inherent with spatial distribution of the praying community.
With all this history behind the humble hourglass what more can we learn from an archaeological example? Well when it comes down to planning making a late medieval early Renaissance hourglass one gets instantly humbled by its complexity. Largely the cases of hourglasses of the earliest dates are made from vaious types of wood, but by the Renaissance they were beginning to be made of iron. The earliest picture of an hourglass with the now traditional glass vials comes from an illuminated manuscript (a prayer book) from circa 1340. This hints at the production of refined glass products and other refined goods produced by guilds in the later Middle Ages. Glass blowing is a complicated art on its own regardless of how good the material you are melting. We have surviving recipes for the “sand” in these hourglasses. The components of which are almost as varied as the types of wood or decoration used in making there cases, boiled ieved and rendered eggshells were common as well as crushed marble or the beach sand of the Venetian state! By the 16th century heavy metal oxides had become more common than the less predictable and dense sands used in hourglasses of preceding centuries. It is also in the late Middle Ages that we get the first references not only to how to construct them (which is always vague and the reason why I am building one) but to how they were used in society.
Because objects were costly to produce in the past they have often been associated with not only their use but also social meaning. Hourglasses are no exception if we look at their history and the general history of the development of time in the western world. In the dawn of our existence, the beginning, people where less tuned to marking the passing of an arbitrary amount of time. Hunter gatherer’s clocks would have been the world which surrounded them. The movement of the planet which they couldn’t perceive in its entirety was the pendulum; its effect upon plants and wildlife was the escapement, and they where the hands of their own destiny. As man ceased to be the master of their individual time, but rather began to delegate the time of their fellow man; some method for the marking of the passing of time became essential. The rise of every civilization from the first known people to record time, the Sumerians and their precursors, to the present has coincided with the formation of a calendar to mark the passage of years and days; to mark the planting of crops, which was invariably linked to government and religion, and their formal functions of another artificial and arbitrary construct we call control (Baillie et al. 1956, 1-3).
The first records of mechanical devices for the measuring of time smaller than the interval of the day can be traced as far back as the second millennium B.C. (Drepperd 1958, 4-5). No temporal device of this early period from either Egypt of China survives but the presence and reference of such devices hint at the formation in the minds of people of these cultures of the belief of time as a quantity which could be divided and controlled. The clepsydra or water clock was known to have existed in Egypt at this time and the division of time was in interval of the celestial equinoxes (Vivielle 1977, 4). These devices, like many later clocks used the motive power of gravity. The simplest form of this device is simply a container with a hole in it and they where know to the Egyptians, Jews, Greeks, Chaldeans, and Phoenicians (Vivielle 1977, 4).
However, we do have records of advanced versions which were said to be capable of great feats of accuracy that this simple form could not attain due to the laws of physics, namely the change in the hydraulic gradient. Such devices as the clepsydra constructed by Andronikos of Kyrros in the first century B.C. for which all water clocks garner their Greek name was said to be the most accurate of its time (Vivielle 1977, 4). The Greeks and Romans seem to have taken the clepsydra to perhaps its most complicated level. The Romans having come to what one could call an early version of daylight savings time had realized that the amount of daylight was variable upon season. Therefore, “The Roman hour was variable in length according to the seasons of the year. They devised clepsydras that automatically recorded the variations in the length of the hours (Drepperd 1958, 4-5)”.
The clepsydra was a big advancement over perhaps an even simpler form of non-mechanical time reckoning; the sun dial, but in many ways it was inferior. In cold climates the clepsydra was stopped by the water freezing. It also had to be refilled, a possible problem if you lived in an arid climate. As an aid for the seaman it was wholly without merit as the rocking and swaying of a ship would have affected the hydraulic gradient and center of mass of any body of water in use in even the simplest of clepsydra. The clepsydra had been useful in determining the latitude of the cities along the Nile River during observations of the equinox with a calendar of the year, but its contemporary, the sundial was in a way just as immobile and therefore not of use to the common seaman. Time as a mental construct was tied directly to the division of the sunlit portion of the day, as this was when work was to be accomplished. For crude division of the day the sundial has always proved adequate, but for all places on the planet save the equatorial plane it is subject to error as the length of the day is dependant upon the location of the observer and the time of year (Vivielle 1977, 4).
Another time keeping device was developed that solved these problems of the clepsydra and the sundial, the clepsammia, hourglass, or horloge. This device once again used gravity as its motive power, and had many similarities with the clepsydra. It is first described in written sources in the year 220 A.D. by Clement of Alexandria. However, some French scholars have claimed that it was invented closer to their home by the monk Luitprand in Chartres in middle of the 8th century A.D. (Vivielle 1977, 5). The water was replaced with sand and therefore couldn’t freeze. It also never had to be refilled like the clepsydra. However, this device had its drawbacks. The device had to be constantly attended to be turned over, also the greater density and other physical properties of the sand made construction of large clepsammia impractical. All three of these devices have mechanical faults that make them impractical or unreliable for timekeeping.
The sun dial was only useful during the day, was relative to your position on our planet, as well as the season. The clepsydra was cumbersome, was affected by climate, and was susceptible to changes in the hydraulic gradient. The clepsammia was somewhat unreliable, relative to the particular clepsammia, and required constant attention. However, for the seaman the horloge would become the principle tool for telling the common time as well as dividing labor onboard ship starting in the 14th century (Vivielle 1977, 5). This was due to the fact that these small portable temporal devices could be used for such simple tasks as dividing labor in equal amounts of time and determining the speed of a vessel in travel. As other forms of timekeeping disappeared with the ancient world after the fall of Rome it comes as no surprise that the hourglass continued to be used for it was the most important device for the common navigator or delegator of time as it was the simplest and most versatile.
It would appear that the unreliability of the clepsydra, sundial, and clepsammia had a large part to play in the development of the first mechanical clocks with differentiated and calibrated gears. When the sun dial, clepsydra, and clepsammia failed, many learned scholars depended upon a natural constant, the stars. In this way mathematics and clockmaking where greatly affected. In 1901 a late Hellenic Greek shipwreck was discovered off the coast of the island of Antikythera. This treasure ship was filled with period or antique bronzes and marbles, jewelry, and what some would describe as a computer or clock. This Antikythera mechanism was largely ignored until half a century later when Dr. Price of Yale decided to make an in depth analysis of it over the next two decades. “The Antikythera mechanism was an arrangement of calibrated differential gears inscribed and configured to produce solar and lunar positions in synchronization with the calendar year. By rotating a shaft protruding from its now-disintegrated wooden case, its owner could read on its front and back dials the progressions of the lunar and synodic months over four-year cycles. He could predict the movement of heavenly bodies regardless of his local government’s erratic calendar (Rice, 1995).”
This is the earliest surviving example of a purely mechanical temporal device, it is attributed to Geminus of Rhodes, and presumed to have been constructed by him around 87 B.C. However, other examples of astronomical calculators are mentioned by early historians, one being attributed to Archimedes (Rice, 1995) For all of this sophistication; the ancient Greeks marked the beginning of the unit of time that would correspond to the concept of the 24 hr. day at the instant of sunset. This concept which makes time easier to measure for the lay person which was left over from the ideologies of the Sumerians would inevitably be the bane of the later manufacturer of mechanical clocks (Baillie et al. 1956, 2).
The Dark Ages brought a halt to most scientific endeavors, including the manufacture of precise temporal devices. Science, “…was unholy, and [it was] dangerous to contemplate the vast arena of possible things (Drepperd 1958, 5).” However, some research was done under the auspices of the church. Our origin for the word clock comes from within this time period. The origin for the word clock is generally held to translated from both Medieval French or German into bell. This stems from the fact that it was customary for cities or churches to ring out the hours on a bell. One of the earliest written accounts of this is an order by Pope Sabinianus to ring bells for the seven hours of the day in Rome in the year 605. Some accounts have this early date as the invention of the first mechanical clock, but so many people are credited at later dates and at other locations that no date is certain for this development. It is just as likely the men of the church were employing a clepsammia, clepsydra, or even a sundial for this performance. Candles are also said to have been used during this period as timekeeping devices (Drepperd 1958, 5-6).
Whatever the method of telling time; it was the church as a sponsor which led to the next great development in timekeeping. While the ringing of the bells was one way to disperse the time to people one could imagine an instance when an important person had been upset or become late by not hearing them. By the late 12th or early 13th century the tower clock had become a feature in important towns or cities with large easy to read dials. These early clocks had there mechanical components made by blacksmiths, and for the next three centuries clocks would be largely manufactured of iron by blacksmiths and locksmiths. The earliest clocks are known to have used a “fan fly” to regulate their time keeping abilities. This was in the shape of a fan blade that by its resistance to air density slowed the power going through the mechanical train. Motive power was once again supplied by gravity, but instead of acting on water or sand, a weight possibly in the shape of a weight filled leather bag to save metal (Lucas 1995, 1).
These clocks were designed to enhance the structures they were built into. They were built into towers for much the same reason that the bells had been rung from them, but now they could be seen as well as heard. As tower clocks were constructed into Cathedrals, town halls and other structures of pride they were well decorated.
Two early surviving examples are those of the clock of the Strasbourg Cathedral which was originally completed in 1354, another would be the great clock of Rouen which was constructed in 1389. Both of these clocks have undergone modification of the centuries (Hering 1935, 521-522). One of these modifications was most likely to convert the striking works of these clocks to conform with modern lay time as opposed to Roman Catholic Canonical time (Vivielle 1977, 5). At this time the most prevalent escapement or form of time regulation was the verge and foliot. This escapement has a crownwheel, a gear cut in such a manner as to regulate the time keeping abilities of the mechanism. While this was better that the fan fly, it still was far from accurate (Drepperd 1958, 8). The verge and foliot was not the device however, which would make the mechanical clock the bearer of the renaissance in time. While the verge and foliot could be manufactured to be accurate it was the ancient concept left over from the Sumerians which would plaque the formation of further division of time. In Rome throughout the Middle Ages and Italy in general until the 19th century the start of the day was marked at sunset which was not conducive for separating “days” from one another. Time was marked by 24 divisions which are similar to our hours (Baillie et al. 1956, 2). Time was different in Paris during the 14th century- and we can begin to see a social division in the use of time as well.
“At the start of the Middle Ages, they began to keep track of periods during the day beginning with the hour of Prime, sunrise. Thus time-telling commenced similarly to Jewish hours [ or time, i.e., timekeeping commenced at sunrise]. For the use of the Parisian city dwellers , clocks in churches “struck” a blow [or chime] at Prime; two strikes at Tierce, between sunrise and midday; Three strikes at Sexte, at the noon hour. This time was kept in church usage: these are the canonical hours. In lay life [as opposed to clerical] they divided the twenty-four hours into four quadrants, each quadrant worth 6 hours. The hour was divided into four points; the point was worth a quarter hour. The point itself was divided into ten moments. So the moment was equivalent to one and a half minutes, or 90 seconds in present day time. This moment was divided into twelve ounces; the ounce was equivalent to seven and a half seconds. And the ounce [was divided] into forty-seven atomes; the atome was considered as being so small it was imperceptible (Vivielle 1977, 7)”.
It was the change in the thoughts of the common people on how the perceived time that would bring about the form of time we recognize today; a form of time which has its origins elsewhere in Europe shortly after the end of the revolution in time in late fourteenth century France. “In south Germany the day comprised two cycles of 12 hours each, starting at midnight, and as soon as clocks became fairly common (about 1400) this systems was generally adopted for the ordering of civil affairs (Baillie et al. 1956, 2).” The temporal renaissance was as much a revolution in thought and technology as that which would help the arts flourish across Europe in the following century.
While ironically the church wished to show its dominance and control of the workday and night by the construction of large tower clocks as well as control the meeting times of religious personnel and the marking of holidays; it would be an elite individual who would advance the concept of time the furthest in modern Western European culture. In the inventory list drawn up upon the death of Charles V of France in 1380 is listed not only a large horologe in a small chapel at Louvre which contained “a large timepiece of the sea with two large sand-filled vials, in a large wooden case trimmed with brass (Vivielle 1977, 5)”. This is not surprising as in the work “Book about the deeds and customs of Charles V” written and printed by Christine de Pisan in 1405 Charles the V is known as the most punctual of lords having devised a temporal device made of a candle divided into 24 parts with 8 units for sleep, 8 units for speeches, and 8 units for recreation. This work was widely read during the period and would be influential outside of France. The previously mentioned inventory also mentions several sundials for determining the exact hour of the day at the precise and fixed latitude of his dwelling (Vivielle 1977, 7). It should be noted that while he may have been an elite, Charles the V used the 24 hr. Late Medieval lay time and not the Canonical time which was set as with the earlier pre-Christian timekeepers of the prime to mark the morning as with the Jewish system of telling time.
Tower clocks were large and could not be transported, but during the Renaissance the financial elite began to fund experiments in clockmaking to reduce the overall size of the clock. This would lead to the development of the mantle and the wall clock. One of the limitations imposed on these clocks was that of the means by which they were powered. A weight used for power requires that the case of the clock either be tall or that it be mounted upon the wall. To overcome this technological limitation the mainspring or coilspring drive was invented. This is simply a flat wound spring which replaces the weight as the mechanisms source of power. This invention is first credited to Peter Henlein of Nuremburg in the middle of the fifteenth century. He is also credited with inventing the modern watch or drum clock. There are no surviving examples of his work but contemporary pieces by other makers have these general features.
While the mainspring was a major breakthrough that allowed for the miniaturization of the clock, it produced some unwanted affects. The spring when fully wound produced much more power than when it began to run down, meaning the timekeeping ability of these pieces was variable across this winding cycle. Another invention also credited to Henlein is the stackfreed, a device which in a rudimentary fashion reduced this effect. The stackfreed was simply a cam that was compressed by a flat spring, and thus controlling the amount of power going through the mechanisms train. This was later replaced in the early 16th century by the fusee. This device which is attributed to Zech of Prague had the mainspring in a separate container or barrel, the spring and barrel would pull on the fusee, a truncated cone by which the amount of power/torque was regulated, which was attached to the barrel by catgut cord or later as metallurgical techniques improved by a fine chain. The fusee was in essence a more complicated stackfreed.
Galileo is credited with making the next advance in clockmaking, one that would bring more accuracy to the clock. Galileo after witnessing a swinging lantern made the observation that a pendulum swings in equal amounts of time and is therefore isochronous, a feat no balance-crownwheel escapement can produce. However, it would take almost another century from the time that this was first discovered in the late 16th century for the pendulum to be melded with the verge and foliot escapement (Drepperd 1958, 8-9). This event is credited to the Dutch clockmaker Christian Huygens at the end of 1656 (Leopold 1989, 158). This coincides with the refinement of the minute derivations on clock dials starting in the later half of the 17th century in Britain and the Netherlands, as well as the growing use of the second hand itself (Lucas 1995, 3-4). This event as well as a growing taste by middle class Europeans would lead to the modern clock.
Many of the features of what most people would consider defining of a clock came about via an Anglo-Dutch exchange of men, material, and technology in the 17th century. This exchange is well documented (Leopold 1989, 155). It was the entrepreneur nature of the Dutch by gathering what worked, namely the fusee, the pendulum, and the use of brass to manufacture the mechanical components, and was their free traveling nature that made the diffusion of this knowledge possible (Emmerson 2006, 295-307). It is most likely that Ahasuerus Fromanteel a contemporary of Huygens who traveled to Britain was the first to bring these technologies to Britain in about 1665 (Cescinsky 1919, 92). This is supported by the discovery of a new example made to Huygens design by Salomon Coster of the Hague in the Netherlands in 1657 (Rasch 2007, 25). This in many ways stimulated the Anglo-Dutch clockmaking industry and lead to the next development in the form of a more accurate escapements which would replace the archaic crownwheel, a device which for practical reason, at least in historical accounts, made the horologe or hourglass the preferred tool for telling time aboard ship well into the eighteenth century (Vivielle 1977, 7-11). The pendulum was never meant for the sea because of the interference of the ships inertia on the escapement, but the movement of ships and ideas and technology via diffusion would have significant implications on how time was perceived and the types of temporal devices used on the ships of northern Europe during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.
Hourglasses are the most common form of keeping track of time onboard ships of this period in the Low Contries, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and elsewhere (Vivielle 1977, 3-20). These of course can be used with conjunction of the Dutchman’s log to determine a ships speed, but this technology may not have been present in Sweden at this time. France appears to have gone to the extremes of producing laws and orders on the construction of horloges culminanting in the Naval Clock Gallery by 1410. It is from their records that we get the most precise record of what time at sea was like not only in France but elsewhere.
“”Sailors”, said Aubin in 1702, “divided into forty-eight equal parts, that is, into forty-eight half-hours, the 24 hours from one moon to the next, and have given the name ‘horloges’ to those forty-eight parts.” Thus, six “horloges” equal three hours, which is the length of time of a watch, “on vessels of the Dutch Indies Company”, that is, the duty of each crewman, and at the end of that time they were relieved alternatively by another watch crew, in order to continue the work, “But there are also vessels where the watch is eight horloges or four hours.” Further says Aubin: “The watch is always measured in horloges, each horloge being a half-hour. In France in the King’s ships, the watch is often eight horloges. In other ships it is sometimes six, seven, or eight horloges. Every time they begin a watch, they ring the bell to alert the crew. Also, at the end of each horologe. In England, the watch is four hours, in Turkey, five.” (Vivielle 1977, 7-8).
The horloge was used in every navy and merchant fleet during this period. This was the timekeeping device of the common seaman which has spawned some interesting vernacular terms. The vulgar term ‘whore’ is a corruption of the French ‘horloge’ which as has been stated by historians means half an hour of the common sailors time. This however shows the intimate relationship that the sailor had with time. Jean Parmenier in 1530 is quoted as having said that the penalties for abusing this intimate relationship was harsh, “Concerning a helmsman, or a steerman, who wanted to shorten his watch and who reversed his sandclock before all the sand had run out, “this is a roguish trick, so dastardly,” it was said, “that he was made to eat the sand and the Quarter Master had to watch him!” (Vivielle 1977, 8). This would have been a lethal punishment as many of the horloges of this period where filled with powdered lead or other heavy metal oxides as ‘sand’.
Reconstructing an hourglass for use onboard a boat of this period will tell us quite a lot. The historical research on the material will take us back in time when material objects had far more meaning socially than they do today. The manufacture of this piece will show the various economies and new (sciences) which were needed to fabricate them. Hourglasses are made of wood, iron, glass, leather, wool string, candle wax, copper, and the “sand” which fills them. These artifacts are the sum of their social history and their manufacture. They also have the ability to show us much by using them to recreate the way people measured time, and hopefully what time meant to people 500 years ago. I am starting with the hourglasses because they are the temporal devices I know the least about.
