Timepieces

From shadow on sand to atomic clocks — humanity's chase of ever-more-precise time.

17 posts· 3500 BCE – 1955

• Essen's Flying Bedstead and the death of the astronomical second 1955
• The quartz clock and the wobbling Earth 1927
• The wristwatch goes to war 1917
• The Waltham watch factory, or how time stopped being a luxury 1854
• Breguet's wristwatch, or the timepiece that arrived fifty years too soon 1810
• John Harrison's H4 and the Longitude Prize 1759
• Huygens's pendulum clock: fifteen minutes become fifteen seconds 1656
• Galileo's pendulum, or the clock he never lived to build 1583
• Peter Henlein's pomander, or the clock that fit in a hand 1510
• Henlein's pocket clock, or the day time left the tower 1510
• The Salisbury clock, or the machine that forgot to have a face 1386
• The mechanical escapement, or when clocks learned to tick 1283
• Su Song's clock tower, or the machine that told the whole sky 1088
• The incense clock, or how China measured the night in smoke 520 CE
• Ctesibius's clepsydra, or the water clock that fixed itself 250 BCE
• The Egyptian clepsydra, or how priests told time without the sun 1500 BCE
• The shadow clock, or how Egypt turned sunlight into hours 3500 BCE