Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Time is a huge part of life. Sometimes there isn’t enough. Sometimes there might be too much. Either way the concept of time is always on our minds. Science has looked into the idea of an internal clock, concentrating on an area of the brain known as the hypothalamus. Yet, not everyone has the same level of operation in this part of the mind—just think about the person who always knows what time it is without looking at a clock versus the person who loses five minutes on the journey from the front door to the car when trying to leave in the morning. Therefore, man tried from very early on to find a way to standardize time, particularly once time started to equal currency. There are ancient clocks, modern clocks, and amazingly cool, weird designs of the future. Here is a look at some of the neat ways to keep track of time from the past and unique innovations of today.
1.
Sundial
One of the most widely used time telling devices of ancient times was the sundial. It measured time by utilizing the position of the sun. A well constructed, and then well positioned, sundial can quite accurately tell the local solar time by having the style (which is the thin rod or sharp, straight edge on the disc) aligned with the Earth’s rotation axis—meaning it must always point to true north and be angled horizontally to the geographic latitude of the sundial. As the sun travels across the sky over the span of a day, the shadow edge cast by the position of the style falls along different hour lines on the plate or disc. The fact that this tool was only useful on bright, sunny days and futile at night though made people search eagerly for new devices to tell time.
2.
Clepsydra (Water Clock)
The ancient Greek device known as a clepsydra is literally translated to mean “water thief.” This name is actually quite suiting as the water clock measures time by a regulated flow of a liquid from one vessel to another. There are two different types of the water clock based on the flow of the “water theft” being inward or outward to the measuring vessel. Even though we generally acknowledge the Greek name for this time measurement device because of the fact that civilization perfected the form with gearing, feedback systems, a specialized escapement mechanism, and improved accuracy, they are known to have existed as far back in antiquity as ancient Egypt and Babylon during the 16th century BCE as well as in the early civilizations of China and India even though the exact dates of the water clock in those areas are still less certain. Advances in this type of clock continued throughout the Byzantium Empire and the widely growing medieval Islamic culture to incorporate epicyclic gears, programmability, and water wheels. A lot of the time they were used side by side with sundials to calibrate each other by working together. It was the most widely used time keeping devices until the invention of the pendulum clock in the 18th century because of its relative accuracy.
3.
Pong Clock
The groundbreaking video game known as Pong revolutionized modern game play. While it was relatively simple and is considered to be a dinosaur by current gamers, it was still the first stone on the path to current gaming systems with high tech visualizations, complex story lines, and intricate strategies. To memorialize this radical but elementary game, a large device has been made to keep time with it to embrace the hypnotic quality of a Pong game that could potentially continue forever. A random game of Pong plays itself on the screen of this clock while the “players” keep track of the time with the score of the game. The player on the left scores the hour while the one on the right keeps track of the minutes. If at any point the overwhelming desire to play it yourself becomes too much, the clock can be switched to a normal game mode by means of settings on the back which can just as easily be turned off when you have had your fill and are ready to just have it keep the time for you again.
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Stefanivana
