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Farmhouse Clock
The clock in the Carney Farmhouse dates to .... The clock is an example of ....
The History of Clocks
The history of clocks goes back centuries.
The word clock was first used in the 14th century (about 700 years ago). It comes from the word for bell in Latin (“clocca”). At best, historians know that 5000 – 6000 years ago, great civilizations in the Middle East and North Africa started to examine forms of clock-making instead of working with only the monthly and annual calendar. The first way that people could tell the time was by looking at the sun as it crossed the sky. When the sun was directly overhead in the sky, it was the middle of the day, or noon. When the sun was close to the horizon, it was either early morning (sunrise) or early evening (sunset).
The ancient Egyptians developed a system of dividing the day into parts, similar to hours. ‘Obelisks’ (tall four-sided tapered monuments) were carefully constructed and even purposefully geographically located we believe around 3500 BC. A shadow was cast as the Sun moved across the sky by the obelisk, which it appears was then marked out in sections, allowing people to clearly see the two halves of the day.
The Egyptians divided the day from sunrise to sunset into twelve parts that are called hours. They also divided the night, the time from sunset to sunrise, into twelve hours. But the day and the night are not the same length, and the length of the day and night also changes through the year. This meant that this system of measuring the time was not very accurate because the length of an hour changed depending on the time of year.
The Greeks divided the year into twelve parts that are called months. They divided each month into thirty parts that are called days. Their year had a total of 360 days, or 12 times 30 (12 x 30 = 360). Since the Earth goes around the Sun in one year and follows an almost circular path, the Greeks decided to divide the circle into 360 degrees.
In 1656, a Dutch scientist, Christian Huygens, made the first ‘Pendulum clock’, with a mechanism using a ‘natural’ period of oscillation. Huygens’ clock, when built, had an error of ‘less than only one minute a day’. This was a massive leap in the development of maintaining accuracy, as this had previously never been achieved. Later refinements to the pendulum clock reduced this margin of error to ‘less than 10 seconds a day’. The mechanical clock continued to develop until they achieved an accuracy of ‘a hundredth-of-a-second a day’.
Quartz Crystal Clocks. Quartz is a type of crystal that looks like glass. When you apply voltage, or electricity, and pressure, the quartz crystal vibrates or oscillates at a very constant frequency or rate. The vibration moves the clock’s hands very precisely. Quartz crystal clocks were invented in 1920.(1)
[1). Clocks History | A brief history of clocks - Clocks & Chimes (clocksandchimes.co.uk)