10 Facts about Clocks

1. The earliest type of timekeeper, dating from as far back as 3500 BC, was the shadow clock, or gnomon, a vertical stick or obelisk that casts a shadow.
2. The first clocks used were water clocks: Water clocks have been known to exist as far back as 4000 BC in China. They were later used in ancient Babylon, Egypt and Greece. These clocks were designed by using the force of water falls to turn gears and levers, which made a clock move.
3. Clockworks were initially heavy, cumbersome devices. A clock built in the 14th century by Henry De Vick of Wurttemberg for the royal palace (now the Palais de Justice) in Paris was powered by a 227-kg (500-lb) weight that descended a distance of 9.8 m (32 ft).
4. Flying alarm clock: The most annoying alarm clock ever invented is the ‘Flying Alarm Clock’ that starts flying around on its rotors every time it goes off. Do you want to turn it off? You must catch it first and bring the naughty thing back to base. By the time you do that, you’ll wake the entire house and the neighborhood, as this particular clock screams at 95 decibels!
5. Clocks use Quartz. Quartz, the naturally occurring transparent and beautiful stone has electromagnetic properties. The quartz-crystal clock developed in 1929 for precision timekeeping employs a ring of quartz that is connected to an electrical circuit and made to oscillate between 10,000 and 100,000 hertz (cycles per second). The high-frequency oscillation is converted to an alternating current, reduced to a frequency more convenient for time measurement, and thus made to drive the motor of a synchronous clock or a digital display. The maximum error of the most accurate quartz-crystal clocks is plus or minus one second in ten years.
6. The clock was considered such a luxury in Great Britain, that in 1797, a tax called Parliament Clock Tax was placed on anyone buying a clock or timepiece.
7. The Arabic language uses the same word to indicate concepts such as hour, the exact hour, clocks and wristwatches. It must be very confusing to say ‘tune the clock and tell me what hour it is’ in Arabic!
8. Clocks were invented to regulate prayers: The idea behind inventing a clock was not to tell time for daily businesses and schedules, but to signal the time for prayers. Clocks were used mainly in European monasteries and churches, and not in everyday homes. These places used clocks to congregate at the chapel for morning, noon and evening masses
9. Watches were originally shaped like drums or balls and were worn suspended from a belt or kept in a pocket.
10. Electric wristwatches appeared on the market in 1957, followed in 1959 by an electronic watch with a battery to power the transistorized oscillating circuit. More recent developments have been the LED (light-emitting diode) and LCD (liquid crystal display) watches. The LED, developed in the 1960s, uses the light-producing characteristics of certain semiconductors to illuminate its digital time display; a quartz crystal provides the oscillations that are reduced to compute time. The LCD, produced in the 1970s, uses liquid crystals, materials having optical properties similar to liquids and solid crystals.