Clock History
For those of us who have lived in the XX century and beginning of this third millennium, may seem that time measurement have always consisted in taking a look at a device of artificial mechanism, usually wore like a bracelet –an action that has become familiar. In case the clock stops –something very rare in recent years – we connect the radio. In the middle of the broadcasting, between news and music, you can hear several short beeps followed by longer ones. That is the exact hour delivered by the time signal the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of the Chilean Navy transmits.
The Beginnings

Time measurement and, above all, the use of clocks such as those we have today, have been achieved after many centuries of working, studying and testing with devices of various types.

Thus since time immemorial, man has tried to count the passing of time to organize our life and straighten our destiny. Old civilizations did it, by relating it to the alternation of day and night as well as to the Moon cycles. However, little by little our ancestor’s inventiveness started creating devices that were able to fraction light and dark periods with increasing accuracy. The clock came on stage.

First, it appeared the sun dial which indicated the moments of the day, thanks to the movement of the shadow of the sun over a flat surface with a quadrant. Archeologists discovered that the Chinese people used it some 3000 years before Christ, as well as did the Egyptians and Incas.

Of course this one did not work at night, neither during very cloudy days, nor at twilight or dawn. In addition, the quadrants had to be modified according to the different terrestrial latitudes due to the variation of sun's rays inclination, and the measurement was generally not very reliable because the length of days is different each season of the year.

Thus came into existence the clepsydras, containers that served as water clock, they were first used in Babylonia and Egypt, and then in Greece and Rome. The liquid traveled from a container to a lower or gauged container, which as it was being filled marked the hours passed. Romans even used this type of clock in courts to control the development of hearings. A similar system was usually used at night, with marked candles which as they consumed showed the hours. It was another method to indicate the elapsed time, also known as candle clocks.

Around the III century of our era, when man could at last, master the art of glass making, (special crucibles, high temperature and the casting technique), appeared today’s famous hourglass, with two containers joined by a strait neck. The sand had to be totally dried and they had to find mechanisms that would prevent it from becoming moist, since without these requirements the sand clock did no longer work normally. In the past, a very big sand clock was hard to build and manage; however, Charlemagne ordered to build one that only had to be turned around each 12 hours.

There was plenty of time for machines to begin their reign.

It was in the VIII century when the Italian Pacífico built a weight- driven clock, given as a gift to the king Pepin the Short by Pope Paul I. These were the first steps of the mechanical clock.

Towards the year 1300 these mechanisms were already common in the clocks of some European churches, to the extent that the oldest clock of this type still preserved in good working conditions is the one at Salisbury Cathedral, England, installed in the year 1386.

Nevertheless, the weight clock would improve with the discovery of the Law of Pendulum, stated by Galileo Galilei toward the year 1600. Owing to this, the Dutch mathematician and physic Christian Huyghens, applies the pendulum in clocks with cycloidal curve in 1650, using this system in a wall clock. Also in 1735 stands out John Harrison, English technician, who created the first marine chronometer to determine the longitudes and a compensation pendulum.

At this point, however, some hundred years had gone by, since the first self-winding clock had been invented in the German city of Nuremberg, which allowed building portable clocks. From this period Geneva has been renowned as a famous clock-making center.

Clock development had been important, though there were some unresolved matters, such as the wearing down of parts and consequent inaccuracy in the measurement of time.

This aspect could be modified by Nicolás Faccio in 1704, by using Rubies and sapphires like pivots of the clock's mechanisms. The hardness of this stones significantly reduced the errors from rubbing and wearing out, which meant an improvement in the clock's industry.

Today, we have an unusual variety of types and quality of clocks: handcrafted, electrical, chronometer, alarm clocks, wrist watches, atomic, digital, etc.

The wrist watch, for instance, was created in 1904, by the Swiss clockmaker Hans Wildorsf from the famous Rolex Company, who six years later designed the first wrist chronometer. As to the atomic clocks, they began to be built in 1949, becoming one of the first pacific applications of nuclear energy.

Finally, we can add that the use of quartz properties in watches began in Beil Laboratories, United States, and from the year 1980, its use became popular in wrist watches that replaced the classic round quadrant with minute hand and second hand, for a screen where a direct reading of the hour can be made. A long journey has already been traveled.