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Updated: May 19, 2025
Before there were hour-glasses and clepsydras, most phenomena could be estimated as to their durations and intervals, with no greater precision than degrees of hardness can be estimated by the fingers. Until a thermometric scale was contrived, men's judgments respecting relative amounts of heat stood on the same footing with their present judgments respecting relative amounts of sound.
Then time the feedings two hours apart. "Of the best," I interjected. "My uncle was a fancier of time-keepers and had one in every room, and no two alike in ornamentation, all beautifully decorated." "The ornamentation doesn't matter," said Galen, impatiently. "Do they keep time with anything approaching accuracy?" "As near accuracy," I said, "as any clepsydras ever made."
"Well," he said, "clepsydras always work better when nearly full than when nearly empty. When you feed him have a full clepsydra handy and start it when he begins to eat. Then by it feed him again after two hours. Keep to that interval and to the diet I have enjoined." Next day I spent over three hours in Nemestronia's water-garden, Tanno with me for most of the time.
They constructed sundials, clepsydras, astrolabes, gnomons. Not without interest do we still look on specimens of their method of printing. Upon a revolving roller they engraved, in cuneiform letters, their records, and, running this over plastic clay formed into blocks, produced ineffaceable proofs. From their tile-libraries we are still to reap a literary and historical harvest.
We find, by Sewall's time, that the houses of well-to-do folk all had "quarrels of glass" set in windows. The flight of time in New England houses was marked without doors by sun-dials; within, by noon-marks, hour-glasses, and rarely by clepsydras, or water-clocks. The first mention, in New England records, of a clock is in Lechford's note-book.
The great drawback on the advancement of science in the Alexandrian School was the want of an instrument for the measurement of time, and one for the measurement of temperature the chronometer and the thermometer; indeed, the invention of the latter is essential to that of the former. Clepsydras, or water-clocks, had been tried, but they were deficient in accuracy.
The Arabian astronomers also devoted themselves to the construction and perfection of astronomical instruments, to the measurement of time by clocks of various kinds, by clepsydras and sun-dials. They were the first to introduce, for this purpose, the use of the pendulum.
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