Nicholas Foulkes - Time Tamed

Plaster cast of the oldest extant Clepsydra (now held in the Cairo Museum) the worlds first (surviving) accurate timepiece discovered at the temple of Karnak, dating from 1415 to 1380 BCE.

With the invention of the water clock in Pharaonic Egypt, a way of measuring time (by the amount of liquid that flows regularly from a vessel) had been found. Finally, man had wrested time from the celestial bodies, and slowly the practical application of this almost Promethean gift began. Of course, for the majority, accurate time was not a necessity; ask a medieval peasant the time and he would probably tell you what season it was. Nevertheless, by the early Middle Ages, a combination of water clocks and solar observations were governing activities as varied as the closure of city gates and prayer all signalled aurally by hand-rung bells.

No one knows who invented the mechanical clock, but its arrival in thirteenth-century Europe brought with it the Renaissance and, a little later, the period of European world domination known as the Age of Discovery. For Karl Marx, its importance was in no doubt: The clock is the first automatic machine applied to practical purposes, he wrote to Engels in 1863, and the whole theory of production of regular motion was developed on it. Even though abstract, time had become the ultimate economic object. For Marx, the factory clock had become a symbol of depersonalization and the commoditization of human effort.

The pursuit of time and efforts to capture it with machines has involved strong personalities and great characters who, through their stubborn perseverance, innate genius or sheer eccentricity, have written their names into the history of timekeeping: from prehistoric humans to astronauts, these pages tell a story of mankinds invention of time that begins with us looking at the moon and ends with us walking on it.

Those who surrender to the appeal of clocks and watches enter an endlessly engrossing world: a mechanical microcosm of components capable of the humble task of telling the time or the lofty one of predicting the movements of the stars. The fascination is the same for all whether Pharaoh, eighteenth-century French queen, twentieth-century tycoon, or, in a much more modest way, me, when I was growing up in the 1970s.

At that time, battery-powered watches were all the rage, and old mechanical watches could be had for pennies in junk shops and jumble sales. I wore them until they broke or until I found another I liked. They were everyday objects, and yet I felt they possessed a beauty that, when on my wrist, ever so slightly improved my experience of life. They also amazed me in the way that they compressed their untiring functionality into a space about the size of a coin. Their dials boasted about the number of jewels they contained, their automatic self-sufficiency, and their pride in being Swiss Made. While their case backs proclaimed their impregnability with a list of attributes: waterproof, shockproof, dustproof, anti-magnetic