The first step in understanding modern clocks is to strip off recent additions, leaving the essential parts. There are 2 key things that must be removed in order to reduce a modern mechanical clock to its essential parts. The first, is the modern strategy for setting clocks, the use of Standard Time.
For prophetic reasons it is possible to set Bible Clocks in For various prophetic reasons a Bible Clock can be set to the sun as it appears over Jerusalem.
In the late 1800s railroad companies were discovering that to safely run their operations clocks by all of the people running the railroads had to be set to the same time. Train schedules, all based on accurate time tables, were the key technique for keeping trains from coliding. Without an accurate time-base this key safety system did not work.
In order to provide an accurate time basis for running railroads, the railroad industry adopted Standard Time. For the first time, clocks were set to each other instead of being set by the sun overhead. This was important for safety reasons, but it left most of the population out of the time-setting process. Before the adoption of Standard Time most people set their own clocks, or their town's central clock, via direct observation of the sun.
This process was unchanged since ancient times, and it was fought in various localities like Detroit for many years after Standard Time had otherwise been adopted.
The key time for setting clocks in a pre-Standard Time world is noon, the time of the day when the sun is directly overhead. This is the time when the clock can be set, and it is the "zero point" used by the markings on standard clocks.
In order to understand the roots of mechanical clocks...
Mechanical clocks as we know them now are a relatively modern invention. Their purpose is to provide an indoor, all-season, mechanical measure of time.
If you go hunting for very old, antique clocks, you find original mechanical clocks that only have hour hands and are without minute hands. The reason is in part the original cost, but also because the purpose of a mechanical clock is to provide an equivalent to a sundial.
Since a sundial only has 1 hand, so, too, do original mechanical clocks only have an hour hand, since sundials is where mechanical clocks get their inspiration.
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In order to see the similarity between a sundial and a clock, I've stripped the more recent additions to the mechanical clock from the illustration at left. What remains is only the hour hand and the hour markers.
With this view the similarity is more apparent. The hour hand on a mechanical clock is making a precise sweep, 1 cycle every 12 hours, in a way similar to the movement of a sundial's shadow through the day.
Of course sundails are not circular. Sundials sweep off the hours in an arc based on the angle of the dial, the distance from the equator and the season. These variabilities are related to the movement of the earth through the season and a mechanical clock has none of these movements.
What the mechanical clock shares with the sundial is the exact time of the middle of the day.
Before the invention of standard time, and time zones in general, mechanical clocks were set by observing the sun. When the sun is directly overhead the day is 1/2 way over, 6 hours of daylight (on average) are finished and 6 hours remain.
August 22, 2006
Updated August 22, 2006