The Wonder Of Clocks And Time

Clocks are all around us in this civilized age that we are living in. If you are living in an urban setting you do not have to walk too far before you see a clock. If you are not in an urban setting then you only get to see them at certain places.

The earliest form of the clocks we see around today was the sun dial. It used to show the time by measuring the shadows cast by the sun. The default problem of the sun dial was that it required the sun to shine or you to be able to tell the time. It did not work at night.

After the sun dial came the water clock. This apparently was used for many millenniums because it was fairly accurate. It was set using the sun dial and after that it would be fairly correct at telling the time for quite a while. Who exactly invented these first two clocks is really not known.

The water clock was no longer the most accurate clock when the pendulum was invented. This was around the 17th century somewhere in Europe. With this accuracy of telling time designers started housing the pendulum clock in various designs. The most famous became the longcase clock. Today most of us call it the grandfather clock.

After relying on the pendulum clock for all those years (it is still used today) came the electrical era. The electrical era brought with it the electric clock. It has an electric motor that is wound and then left to run for days at a time. This is also a model of a clock that is still in use today.

The electric clock was further replaced by clocks that required no moving parts at all. They only needed a battery. The clock therefore did not require winding or moving cogs. I am talking about the digital clocks. The only thing that changes is the numbers on the face of the clock. These are the most popular clocks in the metropolitan cities like New York and Tokyo.

Another type of clock that I missed to mention is the alarm clock. It was there even before the electric era. Today it is way more complex but so was the original. These alarm clocks go off at the time you set them to alert you.

Another clock that may be put in almost the same category as the alarm clock is the talking clock. Its actual name is an auditory clock. These will say the time out loud so that you do not have to be looking at them to know the time.

The doomsday clock is however another interesting clock that I must mention. It is a symbolic clock face. It looks at the human species life on earth as being a few minutes to midnight. It is moved by new developments in nuclear and technological weaponry. The fewer the minutes are to midnight the higher the threat to mankind.