Today, clocks tell us more than just the time of
day. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
The mechanical clock was invented
around AD 1300 -- give or take a little. Two
hundred and fifty years later, clocks had become
very sophisticated machines. Otto Mayr's book on
the third century of clock-making, The Clockwork
Universe: 1550 to 1650, provides a remarkable
insight, not just into the glorious clocks of that
period, but into the nature of invention as well.
The invention of the mechanical clock introduced
something new among machines. You wind up a clock
and then sit back to watch it carry out its
function. A well-designed clock goes on and on,
showing the time of day without human intervention
and without self-correction. For that reason, the
ideal clock -- the clock that we almost, but never
quite, make -- soon became a metaphor for divine
perfection.
By the mid sixteenth century, clocks weren't just
accurate; they were also remarkably beautiful --
adorned with stunning, but seemingly useless,
mechanical trimming. Robots marched out on the hour
and performed short plays. Extra dials displayed
the movements of planets. Makers crowned their
clocks with exquisite miniature gold, bronze, and
silver statuary.
Were not the intricate wheels and gears of these
Baroque clocks like the solar system itself -- or
the universe, or the mind of man, or the nature of
God! The best minds and talents were drawn into the
seemingly decorative work of clock-making just
because clocks had so harnessed the imagination of
16th-century Europe.
All this was rather strange: there was no need for
precision time-keeping. The clock wouldn't assert
its role as a scientific instrument until much
later, during the eighteenth century. The need for
keeping track of longitude
-- for comparing the midnight heavens in the West
Indies with those in London -- would eventually
give clock-making a terrible urgency in human
affairs.
But in 1600 the clock was still an esthetic and
intellectual exercise. In our functional thinking
today, we'd probably condemn all that kingly
clock-making as a very poor use of government
resources. Yet the stimulus of the clock eventually
drove us to unimagined levels of quality in
instrument-making. It drove and focused
philosophical thinking.
In the end, the precision of this not-so-frivolous
high technology was a cornerstone for
seventeenth-century scientific revolution, for
eighteenth-century rationalism, and (at length) for
the industrial and political revolution that
brought in the nineteenth century.
Still, it was the work of technologists and patrons
who danced to impractical ends -- people who were
simply having fun. Those are the people who really
change their world. And, make no mistake, those
Baroque clock-makers had a whole lot of fun.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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