The clock is one of the most important devices in all of civilization. It is simply a gadget that we use to know the exact time of day. Its name was taken from a Greek term that meant the sound of a bell. Now, since the clocks made some kind of sound after every hour, it was nicknamed by this name.
We live in a civilized age that has made time so important. It all depends on it. So important, therefore, is the clock. Due to this importance, there are clocks all around us. In a developed area you cannot walk for five minutes before seeing a clock somewhere.
All the watches that we have in our society today have a common ancestor. Their common ancestor is the sundial. It would cast the shadow of the sun around its fixed center to show us the time. The sundial had a great disadvantage that current watches do not have. It only worked during the day.
The water clock arrived shortly after sundial. In fact, it is not known exactly when these two watches were invented. Let’s 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 at night.
The pendulum clock brought a new sense of precise timing in the world of clocks. He would seldom waste time like the water clock. Therefore, it became a great success. I’m sure we’ve all seen one at one point or another. Many of us simply know it as the grandfather clock.
The next evolution of watches came with the electric age. The clocks would have electromagnetically wound electric motors that would run for days. There are many forms of electric clocks that are 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, even more advancements were made. There was the invention of batteries. The two together led the inventors to digital watches. These were watches that did not need mechanically moving components. They are now the most common outdoor clocks in most urban places.
The alarm clock is another important development of the simple clock. Set the time you want to wake up and it will wake up at that time. There are very old models that were very mechanical, but today 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. 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. Symbolically it is 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 manufacture. There will be total human annihilation when the clock at the end of the world strikes midnight.