CHUYÊN ĐỀ "12 CHIẾC ĐỒNG HỒ THIÊN VĂN THỜI TRUNG CỔ" (Bài 1)
Churches in Europe are home to the oldest working clocks of mankind, simply because the fully automatic mechanical clock was an invention created in the heart of the Christian world in the Middle Ages.
The clock in the picture dates from the 1380s. After being overhauled, it can now return to working according to its original design. This can be considered a computer at that time. Its upper clock face, in addition to telling the time, also shows the apparent movement of the Sun and Moon in the sky and the Zodiac. The watch face below is a complex calendar that when moved (thanks to the internal machinery) can calculate what day of the week any given day will fall on, calculate when a non-fixed holiday will occur, and a number of other features.
People all over the world used the shadows of objects illuminated by sunlight, the flow of water and many other manual methods to calculate the time of day from thousands of years BC until the 17th and 18th centuries. These time measuring devices had low accuracy and depended a lot on the weather (on cloudy days the shadows of objects could not be observed and in winter the water was frozen and could not flow).
Only at the end of the 13th century, from the monasteries in Europe, the first clocks that ran completely mechanically without the use of water began to appear. That is the mechanical clock and this invention has helped humanity take a big step forward on the path to entering the era of automation. No longer dependent on weather factors, time measurement now becomes many times more accurate with deviations of only a few minutes/day.
The first mechanical watches did not have a digital display and could only ring when the scheduled time arrived. But people increasingly added more features to it and by the 14th century, the watch could calculate the date, time, holidays, even calculate the time of solar and lunar eclipses and the movements of the planets and became an astronomical clock.
This great invention of the monks quickly spread from monasteries and churches to the outside and soon every major city in Europe had clock towers to tell the time to the people.
———————
Cre: History Research Group – Make Christianity Great As Always
Lesson: Phong Huynh – Watches Columnist
———————
See other articles on the same topic:
