Clocks Through History | Ep 1: Ingenious: The Evolution of Innovation

So many clocks on this desk. Like, you always know what time it is. You always know. Look at these beautiful, shiny clocks. Man, it's amazing how far we've come, right? We go from this to this. You can have anything you want on this. It basically does all of these things and more. So what time is it? I don't know. Humans have been measuring time in various ways for millennia. Our modern-day system of time, the 60 minutes, 60 seconds, that comes from thousands of years ago in ancient Sumer. It was just crazy. Fast forward a couple thousand years. At the Franklin Institute, you can see a model of the Strasbourg clock. Oh, what's that? The Strasbourg clock is an astronomical clock. We have a one-fifth model of this 30-foot-tall clock. Oh, that is so cool. And it has so many different amazing components to it. One of them is a celestial globe. It shows the location of the stars in the sky. Whoa. I know. My favorite component, though, is there's an automaton rooster at the very top of the clock. Flaps its wings. It crows and everything? Crows on the hour. Wow, that is super awesome. Throughout history, we've measured time all sorts of different ways, right? We started with stars because they're moving in the heavens all the time, but eventually we wanted to harness that. So we looked at our closest star, the sun, and we used its constant light to make shadow clocks, and obelisks were used for that, and they date back to ancient Egypt. But it's not always sunny out, right? Sometimes we need something that will work in the cloudy days, and that's where a water clock comes in. They could be used during the night, they could be used indoors, and they date back to like 325 BCE. But sometimes you don't have water, and so you would use something like an hourglass. In the 1500s, pocket watches were used to tell time, but they weren't actually put in the pocket. They were actually large clocks that you'd wear around your neck. They didn't fit into the pocket until much later. And then even later still, these small clocks were used to tell time on railroads because you don't want people late to the train, or you don't want your trains colliding. And at that point, we start to kind of fine-tune clockmaking into pendulum clocks in the 1650s, into the 1870s with the mechanical alarm clocks like this one. And by 1927, we end up with the quartz clock, one of my favorite little clock facts, because quartz is piezoelectric, which means if you apply a charge to it, it vibrates at a specific frequency. And you can use that frequency to tell time because it's so kind of predictable. And we use that same kind of idea in the atomic clocks that were invented later in the 20th century. And those use the vibration not of a little bit of quartz, but in fact, a small atom. Essentially, it's a cesium atom, and they would count the number of vibrations to determine time. The atomic clock is still used today as the most precise timekeeper and is used as primary standard for international time and for GPS, satellites, and the internet. And that's important because time is different in different locations, right? If you're on top of Mount Everest versus the bottom of the Mariana Trench, time is actually flowing slightly differently. And we need these atomic clocks to keep things all in sync. Not only do we have that on our wrist these days with our smartwatches, but that lets us keep everything in sync, including health monitors, emails, and all sorts of other stuff. And that is pretty incredible stuff. But which of these clocks is the most ingenious, Susanna? I think it's pretty incredible. Models like the Strasbourg clock that have all these gears and pulleys. It's a whole system of clock mechanism, these small mechanisms that turn hands so that we can all have the same concept of time. I don't know, I don't know. Sometimes I'm like, this watch only does watch things. I need my email, I need all my other stuff. Otherwise, what's the point? It's just telling me the time. Can't you imagine that clockmaker, that tinkerer who is figuring out, oh, you need a mainspring so that your time is more consistent, or a pendulum. All right, you're right, you're right. I think the concept of time in general and being able to kind of match it to something mechanical, that's pretty ingenious. That's pretty ingenious, yes. Thank you. For more episodes, go to beyond.fi.edu, and we'll see you next time.