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Show ;; EVOLUTION OF THE CLOCK. Remarkable Contrivances Used Before Be-fore Our Modern Timepieces. A primitive forni of sundial probably furnished the earliest systematic method meth-od of measuring time,- says the London Electrical Age. Instruments for marking mark-ing the lapse of time are found in both the Bible and Homer. The Chinese made use-of gnomons probably fifteen centuries before Christ. There were many kinds of sundials employed by the Greeks and other nations. The Romans Ro-mans . used obelisks, to which good gnomons were applied. Both' the Romans Ro-mans and Greeks employed men and women to announce the hours, as indicated indi-cated by the public gnomons. There was a ring-dial In the large ship of Hiero. Vitruvius describes the hodometer, hodo-meter, in use by Grecian navigators, which was constructed with "wheels, and seems to have been the forerunner Of the modern clock. But he does it so scantily that it seems probable it was not long in popular favor. - As sundials sun-dials were of no use at night or in cloudy, weather, the need of something i better gave the ancients- the water! ! clock. It has been-proved that Chal- j i deans and Egyptians made use of i I these. The clepsydra, is perhaps the earliest form of water clock. The prin- ! ciple of this instrument was very sim- i pie. The water issued drop .by drop through a small oriilce, falling into a' receiver in which a light floating body I marked the "height of the-water as it I rose. Later the time was marked by a I dial with a hand governed by a float. I Centuries "after' this some very ingenious ingen-ious water clocks were made by the monks of Jerusalem. - The Egyptians, the Persians and the Aztecs of America reckoned their day to begin from sunrise, and divided it into four intervals, - determined by the i rising and setting of the sun, , and its I passage over the meridian. Our own uniform hours of sixty minutes each could scarcely have come into use until something like the -wheel clock was invented. in-vented. The ancient sundial represented represent-ed hours of a length "varying with the i seasons, and th-j water clock was adjusted ad-justed to furnis'i hours of fifty to sev-! sev-! enty minutes each, to suit the changing ! length of day and night. Hour-glasses, originally called - ciepsammia, were modifications of a form of clepsydra, sand taking the place of water. Alfred the Great's candle clock was made in this manner. He procured seventy-tw'o j pennyweights of wax; which was mn I into six candles, each twelve inches long, ' with the divisions distinctly marked. These lit -one after the other, lasted twenty-four hours. They were tended by the king's chaplains. In order-td protect the candle3 from the wind, Alfred finally fashioned the first lanthorn. : .: Some say that Archimedes made the first wheel clock as early as 200 B. C Others give the credit to Wallingford" who lived as late as-the beginning of the fourteenth century. But the more perfect .water clocks -were, long before the latter period, furnished with wheels ' so that the only improvement was the substitution of a solid body to 'act as a moving weight, instead of water It is not to. be wondered at that the application ap-plication of a weight to clocks as a moving power should attract so little attention, as water and sand were undoubtedly un-doubtedly thought more convenient by contemporary writers. , The oldest complete com-plete clock moved by weights is probably prob-ably that sent by the sultan of Turkev to Frederick H. Jn J1232., In the-thir- teenth century many of the church steeples in Italy wer.e furnished with clocks moved by weights, which struck the hours. Hele of Nuremberg is supposed sup-posed to have constructed the first watch in 1500; and to him must also be given the credit of the spring clock. The fusee was probably Invented in England about the end of the sixteenth cr-ntury. But it was not until the middle mid-dle of the seventeenth century that the pendulum was first applied to clocks by Huyghens. , j |