This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out.
In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention.
Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else.
But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds - which had been marked out and known of for millennia - became visibly measurable on a clock. Seconds only became mechanically measurable in the 17th Century, with a Dutchman called Christiaan Huygens. For the first time a pendulum could power a clock to keep an accurate measure of time. Prior to this, time had been loosely measured in factions of an hour - but not so small fractions as a sixtieth!
Nothing I found as I researched the depiction of time surprised me. I used to live in Barrow-upon-Humber, home of John Harrison who fashioned the first reliable clock for seafarers in the first half of the 18th Century, so the art of keeping time is something I have often pondered upon. But it was nonetheless more detailed and intricate than I had expected. Certainly, from now on I shall be more particular about my characters' understanding of time, feeing that I now have a little better understanding of its own chronology!
Fascinating thought! Funny how much I still take for granted after all these years!! Thank you xx
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