(Roughly) Daily

Time has ordered human life for millennia….

The Tower of the Winds, in the Greek city of Athens… is one of the best-​preserved buildings from the ancient world. This octagonal marble tower, sited close to a busy marketplace at the foot of the hill of the famous Acropolis, rises forty-​two feet into the air and measures twenty-​six feet across, and it was an astonishing sight for the people of this crowded and vibrant city. The external walls were covered in brightly colored reliefs and moldings representing the eight winds, with each of the eight walls, and a semi-​circular annex, carrying a sundial. Inside the ceiling was painted a stunning blue color covered with golden stars. At the center of the imposing interior was a water clock, which was fed from a sacred source high up on the hill of the Acropolis called the Clepsydra, a name which became synonymous with all water clocks. The clock is believed once to have driven a complex mechanical model of the heavens themselves, like a planetarium, orrery, or armillary sphere.

Nobody is quite sure when the Tower of the Winds was built, but it was probably about 140 bc. As with the sundial at the Roman Forum, we can think of it as an early public clock tower, giving Athenians the time of day as they went about their daily business at the market and elsewhere, and giving order to their lives. It was also symbolic of a wider order. The gods of the winds, depicted on its decorative panels, were allegories of world order; the stars inside, together with the water clock and its mechanical replica of the heavens, were symbolic of a cosmic order. Certainly, it was an astonishing spectacle.

But, also like the sundial proudly installed by Valerius in Rome, the Tower of the Winds may have carried a further message. If, as some historians believe, the structure was built by Attalos II, king of the Greek city of Pergamon, to commemorate the Athenian defeat of the Persian Navy in 480 bc, then it could serve as a vivid peacetime reminder of the military strength of the state—​and the discipline needed to maintain it…

In empires around the world, the sight and sound of time from high towers had begun to organize the lives of the people, and project a message of power and order.

…

It is tempting, in the twenty-​first century, to feel that we are the first generation to resent being governed by the clock as we go about our daily lives; that we are no longer in control of what we do and when we do it because we must follow the clock’s orders. During our long warehouse shifts, sitting at our factory workstations, or enduring seemingly never-​ending meetings at the office, we might grumble that the morning is dragging on, but we cannot eat because the clock has not yet got around to lunchtime. But these feelings are nothing new. In fact, while the public sundial was new to Romans in 263 bc, it had been in widespread use long before that in other cities around the world; the first water clocks date back even further than sundials, more than 3,500 years to ancient Babylon and Egypt.

It is easy to think that public clocks are an inevitable feature of our lives. But by looking more closely at their history, we can understand better what they used to mean—​and why they were built in the first place. Because wherever we are, as far back as we care to look, we can find that monumental timekeepers mounted high up on towers or public buildings have been put there to keep us in order, in a world of violent disorder.

Public time has been on the march for thousands of years: “Monumental Timekeepers,” an except from David Rooney‘s (@rooneyvision) About Time- A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks. Via @longnow.

* Alan Lightman

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As we watch the clock, we might send timely birthday greetings to George Alfred Leon Sarton; he died on this date in 1956. A chemist by training, his primary interest lay in the past practices and precepts of his field…an interest that led him to found the discipline of the history of science as an independent field of study. His most influential work was the Introduction to the History of Science (three volumes totaling 4,296 pages), which effectively founded that discipline. Sarton ultimately aimed to achieve an integrated philosophy of science that connected the sciences and the humanities– what he called “the new humanism.” His name is honored with the prestigious George Sarton Medal, awarded by the History of Science Society.

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