The mechanical clock
Time stops being something you read off the sun.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 50 years
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
Weight-driven escapement clocks appear in European monasteries and towns around 1300, initially to regulate the hours of prayer. They divide the day into equal hours regardless of season, unlike every previous system, and they put a public bell in the town square that governs work, markets and meals. Lewis Mumford argued the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the industrial age, because it made time itself measurable and saleable.