Time Telling through the Ages. Harry Brearley
water supplied the motive power and served as well to regulate the action."
There is a general belief that Gerbert, the monk, who was the most accomplished scholar of his age, and who later became Pope Sylvester II, was the one who first took the important step of producing a real clock, and that this occurred near the close of the tenth century – or to be more exact, about 990 A. D. This period was one of densest superstition, and expectancy of the end of the world was in the air, since many people had fixed upon the year 1000 A. D. as the date of that cataclysmic event.
Authorities of the Church and of the state were not very partial to invention and research, their attention being fixed largely upon theological, political, or military affairs; but, of course, inquiring and constructive minds were still to be found; even without encouragement these tended to follow the impulse of their natures.
It is to the monks in their cloisters that we chiefly owe the preservation of learning through the "dark ages," and from the monks, for the most part, came such progress of science and invention as was made. If Gerbert, the monk, after patient tinkering with wheels and weights in his stone-walled workshop, really achieved some form of the clock-action as we know it, he was one of the great benefactors of the human race. Still, it is not impossible that his device may only have been a more remarkable application of the clepsydra principle.
Whatever it was, it seems to have startled the authorities, for they are said to have accused him of having practiced sorcery through league with the devil, and to have banished him for a time from France. His age appears to have had a vast respect for the intellectual powers of his Satanic Majesty. Anything which was too ingenious or scientific to be understood without an uncomfortable degree of mental application was very apt to be ascribed to diabolic inspiration and thus found unfit for use in "Christian" lands. It could hardly have been a stimulating atmosphere for would-be inventors.
All of the credit that we are ascribing to Gerbert must therefore be prefixed with an "if." Did he really invent the clock-movements, or is this merely another of the tales which have blown down to us from this age of tradition and romance? For similar tales are told of Pacificus in 849 A. D. of the early Pope Sabinianus in 612 and even of Boetheus, the philosopher, as far back as 510 A. D., while always in the background are claims of priority for the Chinese who are supposed to have discovered many of our most important mechanical and scientific principles away off upon the other side of the world before these were dreamed of in the west.
If all of these various claims were true, which is far from likely, it still would not need to surprise us, for it must be remembered that humanity, until within the past few generations, was more or less a collection of separated units and its records were very incomplete. There was scant interest in abstract research and very limited intercourse between towns and countries; one who made an important discovery in one locality might be unheard of a hundred miles away. Unless all the conditions were favorable, his ideas might even pass from memory with his death, until some scholar of modern times might chance upon their record.
All that can with certainty be said, therefore, is that there were clocks of some sort in the monasteries during the eleventh century; that back of these were the clepsydræ and other time recording devices; and that here and there through the preceding centuries are more or less believable tales of inventions that had to do with the subject.
Let it be remembered, too, that some of the brilliant minds of ancient times made discoveries that were forgotten after the barbarian waves overwhelmed preceding civilizations. The ages following the downfall of Rome were those of intellectual darkness, illiteracy, and rude force until mankind groped slowly back toward the light through the process of rediscovery.
Thus, it mattered not at all to the medieval world that Archimedes, the great Greek scientist and engineer – who, however, chanced to live in the Greek colony of Sicily – was able, somewhere about 200 B. C., to construct a system of revolving spheres which reproduced the motion of the heavenly bodies. Such a machine must necessarily have involved some sort of clock-work. We dare not stop to consider Archimedes, lest we stray too far from our subject, but this marvelous man of ancient times, the Benjamin Franklin of his day, seems to have had a hand in almost every sort of mechanical and scientific research, from discovering the principle of specific gravity, in order to checkmate a dishonest goldsmith, to destroying Roman war-ships by means of his scientific "engines." The story is told that he set the ships on fire by concentrating upon them the rays of the sun from a number of concave mirrors. And, although this story may not be true, the things that he is known to have done are extraordinary.
Archimedes and his knowledge had long passed away when the monastery clocks of the eleventh century began to sound the hour. These were the fruit of a crude new civilization just struggling for expression, and represented the general period when William the Conqueror led his Norman army into England.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Modern Clock and Its Creators
We learn that toward the close of the thirteenth century a clock was set up in St. Paul's Cathedral in London (1286); one in Westminster, by 1288; and one in Canterbury Cathedral, by 1292. The Westminster clock and the chime of bells were put up from funds raised by a fine imposed on a chief justice who had offended the government. The clock bore as an inscription the words of Virgil: "Discite justitiam moniti," "Learn justice from my advice," and the bells were gambled away by Henry VIII! In the same century, Dante, whose wonderful poem the Commedia, (the Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise) is sometimes called the "Swan Song of the Middle Ages," since it marks the passing of the medieval times, spoke of "wheels that wound their circle in an orloge."
Chaucer speaks of a cock crowing as regularly "as a clock in an abbey orloge." And this shows, curiously, the early meaning of the word, for by the word "clock," Chaucer evidently meant the bell which struck the hour, and, very obviously, he used the word "orloge" to indicate the clock itself.
Many of these "clocks" had neither dials nor hands. They told time only by striking the hour. Sometimes in the great tower clocks there were placed automatic figures representing men in armor or even mere grotesque figures which, at the right moment, beat upon the bell. These figures were called "jacks o' the clock" or "jacquemarts" and curious specimens of them are still in existence.
The early abbey clocks did not even strike the hour but rang an alarm to awaken the monks for prayers. Here again, the alarm principle precedes the visible measurement of time; even now, as already noted, we speak of a "clock" by the old word for "bell."
In the course of the following century – the fourteenth – clocks began to appear which were really worthy of the name, and of these we have authentic details. They were to be found in many lands. One of them was built, in 1344, by Giacomo Dondi at Padua, Italy. Another was constructed in England, in 1340, by Peter Lightfoot, a monk of Glastonbury. And in 1364, Henry de Wieck, De Wyck, or de Vick, of Wurtemburg, was sent for by Charles V, King of France, to come to Paris and build a clock for the tower of the royal palace, which is now the Palais de Justice. It was finished and set up in February 1379, and there it still remains after lapse of five and a half centuries, although its present architectural surroundings were not finished until a much later date.
This venerable timepiece termed by some chroniclers "the parent of modern timekeepers," was still performing its duty as late as 1850. And so it is a matter of interesting record that its mechanism, which served to measure the passage of time in the days when the earth was generally believed to be flat and when the Eastern Division of the Roman Empire was still ruled from Byzantium, now Constantinople, has served the same purpose within the possible memory of men now living. Its bell has one grim association – it gave the signal for that frightful piece of Medicean treachery, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, planned by Catherine de Medici, the mother of the King Charles IX, when the armed retainers of the crown of France flung themselves upon the unsuspecting Huguenots and caused the streets to run red with the blood of men, women and children – a ghastly butchery of thousands of people.
As we have seen, de Vick's clock was neither the earliest made, nor among the earliest; nor, probably, did it embody any at that time new mechanical invention. It does, however, fairly and clearly typify the oldest style of clock of which we to-day have any accurate knowledge. Compare its