Importance of time and clocks

The clock is one of the most important devices of any civilization. It is simply a gadget that we use to know the exact time of day. Its name was taken from a Greek term meaning the sound of a bell. Now, since the clocks made some kind of sound after every hour, it was nicknamed by this name.

We are living in a civilized age that has placed great importance on time. Everything depends on it. That’s how important the clock is. Due to this importance there are clocks all around us. In a developed area you can’t walk for five minutes before you see a clock somewhere.

The watches we have today in our society all have a common ancestor. Their common ancestor is the sundial. It would cast the sun’s shadow around its fixed center to show us the time. The sundial had one major drawback that today’s clocks do not. It only worked during the day.

The water clock came shortly after the sundial. In fact, it is not known exactly when these two watches were first invented. Let’s just say it was a long time ago. The sundial was used to set the water clock, which would then tell the time quite accurately. Yes, even during the night.

The pendulum clock brought a new sense of precision in time to the world of watches. It would rarely waste time like the water clock. Thus, it became a great success. I’m sure everyone at one time or another has seen one. Many of us know it simply as the grandfather clock.

The next evolution in watches came with the electrical age. The watches would have electromagnetically wound electric motors that would run for days. There are many forms of electric clocks still in use today. You don’t have to worry about winding them every six hours.

With the introduction of electricity to the world of watchmaking came even more advancements. There was the invention of batteries. The two together led inventors to digital watches. These were watches that did not need mechanical movement components. They are now the most common clocks on the outside of most urban places.

The alarm clock is another important development of the simple clock. You set the time you want to wake up and it will turn off at that time. There are very old models that were very mechanical but nowadays we even have digital models that will wake you up with your favorite tune.

We can categorize the alarm clock with the auditory clock. Many people call the auditory clock the talking clock. You just press a button and it says the time out loud for you. This is very good, for example, when you are asleep and you don’t want to get up and turn on the lights.

The latter is not literally a watch. It is symbolically a clock. It’s called the doomsday clock. Count the threats to human existence in the number of minutes before the clock strikes twelve. These threats are, for example, the nuclear weapons we build. There will be total human annihilation when the doomsday clock strikes midnight.