A love letter to timekeeping: How clocks have shaped our world

The methods we use to keep track of time have evolved enormously over thousands of years, but they have also changed our lives along the way.

It goes without saying that a watchmaker would be fascinated by watches. I started my training in the art of traditional artisanal watchmaking 20 years ago – using centuries-old techniques to create little machines that can tell us the time of day. Horology – the art and science of timekeeping – is a world of extremes. There is a radical contrast between the microscopic components on my work bench and their connection to the vastness of the Universe around us.

It's not just the intricate, minute and mind-bendingly complex innards that keep me so infatuated, it's the way this tiny world we've created has done so much more than tell us the time of day. Each major innovation in timekeeping technology has also transformed our experience of time. These are some of the key developments that have moulded our modern temporal world.

Time unkept

In an age when our personal electronic devices stalk us through our daily lives, it's hard to imagine a time when we lived around the cycles of the natural world. Before the advent of a means to measure time, it was, effectively, unkept. Lunar calendars arrived first, with the earliest contenders dating back at least 10,000 years.

To divide our days into smaller parcels of time – ones we could use to organise our working day, trade and travel – we needed a device. Among the earliest of these are sundials. The oldest we would recognise by modern standards dates to around 1300BC and was found during the excavation of a worker's hut in the ancient Egyptian burial site, the Valley of the Kings.

The oldest clepsydra, or water clocks with their name originating from the Greek for "water thief", are similarly ancient. Alabaster and black basalt vessels with holes drilled to allow the slow and controlled flow of water over a pre-determined duration were used by the ancient Egyptians for this purpose, while others made from clay dating to the Bronze Age have been found on the coast of the Black Sea in what is now modern-day Ukraine. Variations on this basic system developed all over the world, from ancient Babylon and Persia to India, China and Native North America and ancient Rome.

Keepers of time, powered by mechanical means, are the infants of this journey.

The first 'tick, tock'

To arrive at what is, to me, the most significant early advance in timekeeping we must head forward to the year AD1088 to what is now Henan province in China. Celebrated inventor Su Song had been commissioned by the emperor to create a water clock like no other, intended to showcase the intellectual prowess of the Northern Song dynasty. The brief involved complex celestial displays: at the time, dynastic houses were ruled according to a heavenly mandate, or tianming, which required an ability to track and predict astronomical events for interpretation, as a guide to inform bureaucratic decisions.

What's fascinating about Su Song's pioneering piece of engineering is that it represents the first escapement – the mechanism that alternately checks and releases the power of the gear wheels. This group of components – capable of locking and releasing motive energy from a source like water, gravity or a spring – would become instrumental in the invention of the first fully mechanical clocks that appeared in Europe in the 14th Century. It would also have been the first moment in history when the "tick, tock" sound of a clock was heard. It started out as a slow, melodic slosh and clunk of water repeatedly spilling before being caught by wood nearly a millennia ago.

Time machines

The need for more advanced (and portable) time-telling machines came from several corners. Scientists, like astronomers, who had previously relied on less reliable or variable methods of timekeeping to make their observations needed a device that could count regular hours and minutes. The Christian church was expanding across Europe and, unlike Muslims in the Islamic Golden Age, sunshine to read a sundial or astrolabe and mark prayer times couldn't be relied on. A water clock like Su Song's in the freezing northern reaches would have been useless.

The first fully mechanical clocks date replaced water with the force of gravity, using heavy weights winched up on rope that was spooled around barrels and would rotate as the weight descended. This system made them so large that, at their advent, they were exclusively restricted to architectural installations. They had no dial, chiming out the hours on bells from upon high, ringing out across Medieval European villages and cities from the towers of churches, cathedrals and town halls.

The name clock derives from the Medieval Latin clocca meaning bell. You would have only been able to hear the time on the hour. Time was very much a shared experience with communities all working to their local clock. In a world without public transport, media, telephones or the internet, smaller divisions of time were of little value to the bulk of the population.

The turn of the 16th Century marked the advent of the first watches, tiny clocks small enough to carry around with us through our daily lives. Although these were still the preserve of the ultra-wealthy it wasn't long before they were changing our relationship with time yet again.

Working nine to five

In the traditional artisan watch and clockmaking world, the Industrial Revolution triggered what the process economist Joseph Schumpeter described as "creative destruction".

For watch and clockmakers, who had largely operated as small workshops creating tiny numbers of valuable pieces the industry was about to be turned on its head. Improvements in manufacturing techniques and materials knowledge increased production quantity and drove the cost of watches down. Technological advances, like those made by John Harrison when he invented the marine chronometer, a timekeeper so accurate it could be used to calculate longitude at sea, turned the watch from being a bauble for the elite into a serious piece of scientific equipment.

Historian EP Thompson poetically described the role of the watch in 18th-Century Britain as "the small instrument which regulated the new rhythms of industrial life". This combination – our increasingly time-kept world meeting wider personal timekeeper ownership – created conflict. Greater reliance on shift work in factories, and the exploitation of the working poor had made opportunities for unscrupulous factory masters to eke as much work as possible out of their staff.

An account by one 19th Century factory worker in Dundee, Scotland, described working conditions:  "In reality there were no regular hours: masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression. Though it is known among the hands, all were afraid to speak, and a workman then was afraid to carry a watch, as it was no uncommon event to dismiss anyone who presumed to know too much about the science of horology."

It could be argued that the Industrial Revolution can be blamed for the beginning of the end of our work/life balance. It was the moment when time went from being our useful ally to a form of social control.

Disposable time

The mechanical watch would reign supreme until the mid-20th Century when a new form of technology threatened to change it all. On Christmas Day 1969, Japanese watchmakers Seiko released the Astron, the world’s first commercial quartz watch.

Advertised as being 100 times more accurate than its mechanical rivals, the Astron wasn't cheap – only 100 were made initially and sold at Y450,000 (around £10,000/$12,000 in today’s money) – but that didn't remain the case for long. Through massive investment in technology, streamlining production and increasing automation, quartz watch movements became more and more affordable. Today, you can buy a perfectly functioning quartz watch movement for a handful of change.

The traditional watch-making industry that was by this time blooming in Switzerland was not prepared. They were slower to invest in new technology and increasingly had to source parts from overseas. This, combined with the rising value of the Swiss franc, priced them out of the low-value market. By the early 1980s, their industry was in a catastrophic state of decline with mass redundancies and hundreds of companies collapsing, causing recessions in the old watchmaking world and what is referred to as "the quartz crisis".

The salvation of the Swiss watch industry came largely in the form of one man – Nicolas Hayek. Hayek was approached by banks to oversee the liquidation of two Swiss watchmaking firms that had been forced out of business by the quartz crisis. Rather than close the businesses altogether, he believed that with substantial restructuring there was a way ahead. Hayek came up with the idea of producing affordable quartz watches from cheap materials like plastics and resins, in a huge range of bold, fashionable technicolour designs. He called his new brand Swatch.

Swatch watches were so attractive and affordable that they changed the way people bought and used watches in general. Lanny Mayotte, marketing director for US rival firm Armitron, put it well: "People today have a wardrobe of watches. Years ago you bought a watch for graduation, and it was handed down to the children. Why not have a fun watch rather than a boring, old, expansion-band watch?"

Five hundred years earlier, a watch had been one of the most expensive personal luxuries money could buy. Now you could purchase one in every colour from your local department store.

Creative destruction v.2.0

For watch and clockmakers, one of the greatest changes of the last century has been the rapid shift from craftsperson to machine. The quartz crisis, price wars and budget cuts meant that from the 1970s to the 1990s there was little room left for the skill of the master craftsperson. Humans cost more than machines, and so the more a watch could be made by machine the better.

Now we are in a new phase again. Technology has overtaken even the quartz watch. First mobile phones and then smartwatches have become the main tools for our daily timekeeping. But the Apple Watch, for example, is not only a timepiece accurate to within 50 milliseconds, but a phone, internet browser, email provider, car key and fitness tracker, and can even offer ECG and oxygen-level readings – multiple technologies contained in one small package.

Smartwatches are no longer just a way of keeping track of time, but are a communication tool and becoming a primary source of information. We can pay for our morning coffee with them and keep tabs on our health. Exactly what impact this change in time-keeping technology will have on our lives is still too early to tell, but it is already transforming the way we interact with the world around us.

I'm currently creating a watch that tracks the phases of the Moon – the same cycle we used to start measuring the passage of time tens of thousands of years ago. While there are smartwatches that can do this, for me, it isn't the same.

The modern world is terrifyingly fast. I think that's why I love working in the way I do. As a traditional craftsperson you give yourself over to the hours, days, or, in my case, months and often years it takes to make something. It is time, well spent.

* Rebecca Struthers is a watchmaker, historian and author of the book Hands of Time: A Watchmakers History of Time.

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