It is difficult to imagine a modern person, especially living in a big city, without this instrument for measuring time. The clock gives a person a time reference that connects him with other people and adjusts him to the surrounding reality.
Sun orientation
The first time tracking devices were mostly guided by the sun and were entirely dependent on it. For this simple reason, these mechanisms lost their usefulness during cloudy and rainy weather, and at the same time at night. This method of time reckoning was invented in Ancient Egypt, and it was also used in India and Tibet. The Greeks were the first to think of dividing the year into 12 parts, and the month into 30. The sundial began to be used around 3500 BC. In order to determine when the astronomical noon comes, a special device was used - a gnomon. When he cast the smallest shadow in length, it was noon. However, this method was also not ideal, since it was required to change the position of the gnomon during the change of seasons, if it was not located parallel to the earth's axis. In addition, such watches did not take into account the difference in time zones.
Time is up
Starting from 1400 BC and up to the 17th century, mankind actively used a water clock, also called "clepsydra", to measure time. Among representatives of different peoples, they had a slightly different structure and principle of operation. Thus, among the Egyptians and Greeks, time was counted by the number of drops of water flowing out of the vessel, while among the Chinese and Hindus, on the contrary, by the number of drops of water that filled the vessel floating in a pool of water. It is thanks to the water clock that the winged expression "Time is up" appeared.
Pendulum models
It was only in the 17th century that people invented new watch models that were radically different from all previous ones. It was a clock that, due to the oscillations of the pendulum, turned a cogwheel, which, in turn, changed the position of the minute hand. There was an imperfection in this model as well: the oscillations died out at some point, and the pendulum had to be swung again by hand. True, later the pendulum model was somewhat improved, adding first external and then internal batteries to it. By the 19th century, the dial of the watch took on the form most familiar to modern man, that is, it was divided into 12 parts. It should be noted that even now pendulum clocks can be found in some houses, for example, floor or wall clocks.
Modern wristwatches
Switzerland is rightfully considered the birthplace of wristwatches, because a resident of this particular Western European country - John Harwood - first began to mass produce them. It happened in 1923. Shortly thereafter, in 1927, the Canadian Warren Marrizon invented the first quartz models of wristwatches, which are distinguished by particularly high precision. It is noteworthy that for the first time they began to wear a watch on the wrist long before all these events, during the life of Blaise Pascal, who was the first to do this, attaching the watch to his hand with a thread. Of course, all the variety of modern watch models, and most importantly - their accuracy and reliability, humanity owes each of the stages of their development and formation.
