Time Telling through the Ages

Did you ever, at the end of a journey—perhaps across water, or up to the top of some high hill—look backward to the place from whence you came, and wonder that it seemed so far...

We learn that toward the close of the thirteenth century a clock was set up in St. Paul's Cathedral in London (1286); one in Westminster, by 1288; and one in Canterbury Cathedra...

Across the English Channel lives a race of a very different character. The French are people of highly adaptable minds; often they see possibilities in the inventions of other n...

Now we must jump over ages so vast in duration that all of our recorded history is by comparison, the merest fragment of time. During the prehistoric period, known to us only by...

While Eli Terry was sawing wood for his curious clocks back in the early days of the nineteenth century, Luther Goddard, America's first watch-manufacturer, was preaching the Go...

At last the clock industry came to America, and it came on horseback. If you had been upon a dusty country road in Connecticut about the year 1800, you might have seen a plainly...

We now have reached a point far ahead of our story and must take a backward step. We have been seeing man as a mere observer of nature; but man doesn't stop with nature as he fi...

From the beginning, there are two sides to the history of timekeeping. The first is the story of discovery and invention—how men labored for thousands of years to produce a cont...

In the second act of Shakespeare's play, _As You Like It_, when Touchstone, the fool, meets Jaques, the sage, he draws forth a sun-dial from his pocket and begins to moralize up...

Now, since we are at last well into the story of the watch, let us glance back over the road we have traveled. We have seen man first beginning to think of time by noting the po...

If this were purely a story of the development of timepieces as mechanisms, there would be little to add to the preceding chapter, save to detail the refinements and improvement...

The most important development in any affair is naturally the one which concerns the greatest number of people. In the United States, it is the people who count and nothing can...

Now the scene changes again, and the story shifts forward over the interval of a thousand years. As we take up the tale once more, we find ourselves in another world, amid a lif...

Heretofore, the history of timepieces had been that of an easily traceable evolution, for each of its steps had grown naturally out of those before it, and the various improveme...

Now we must take another backward step of thousands of years. In considering the subject of time-recording, it seems necessary to wear a pair of mental seven-league boots, for w...

One of those mental marvels who can play fifteen simultaneous games of chess, blindfolded, might be able to form a complete idea of the American watch-making industry in the yea...

Every now and then one sees a picture of a lean old gentleman, with a long white beard, flowing robes, and an expression of most misleading benignity. In spite of his look of ki...

The story of the watch that you hold in your hand to-day began countless centuries ago, and is as long as the history of the human race. When our earliest ancestors, living in c...

It was a moonless night in No Man's Land. A man in khaki stood silently waiting in a frontline trench. In the darkness, his eyes were drawn, fascinated, to the luminous figures...