The Engines of Our Ingenuity 1535: Inventing the Clock

0:00This programming is sponsored by Metro, introducing the Ride Metro Faircard. The Ride Metro Fair system replaces the Metro Q Faircard for bus and rail fares. Details at ridemetro.org slash fair system. This is the engines of our ingenuity, made possible by the friends of KUHF Houston. Today, we invent the mechanical clock. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. I've remarked before how hard it is to date the first mechanical clocks. Old manuscripts start hitting at them in the late 1200s, but we find no clear picture of a clock until a century later. One hint was dropped by the poet Dante in the early 1300s. He said, as clock that calleth up the spouse of God sends out a tinkling sound of notes so sweet, thus saw I move the glorious wheel.

1:05That's no older water clock. Dante had to have been touched by the rhythmic escapement mechanism and turning gears of the new mechanical clocks. Historian Jean-Guipel describes the freewheeling medieval view of invention that finally gave us mechanical clocks. In a burst of intellectual optimism, Gilbert of Tourne cried, the truth is open to all for it is not yet totally possessed. Bernard or Shart said, we are as dwarfs mounted upon the shoulders of giants. That was 600 years before Newton changed it slightly. Bernard was telling us what we could do. When Newton changed we to I, it turned from a remark about possibility into a boast about his own accomplishments. Medieval inventors turned their optimism into a son's prey of creativity. They made Gothic cathedrals fully evolved manuscript books, crossbows, eyeglasses, water power systems, and in the mid-13th century they started thinking about machines that could point at the moving sun throughout the day.

2:06Not exactly a clock, though, that is what the face of your clock really does today. In 1271 a writer called Richard the Englishman issued a tantalizing report. Clockmakers, he said, are trying to make a wheel, which will make one complete revolution for every equinoctial circle. The method of making such a clock would be this, that a man make a disk of uniform weight, then a lead weight should be hung from the axis of the wheel, so that it would complete one revolution from sunrise to sunrise. Richard leaves us to wonder how they made a wheel unwind just one revolution a day. Was it to be a very heavy wheel with a very small spindle? Perhaps the idea had yet to be worked out, or maybe Richard had seen one of the new clock escapement mechanisms and not fully understood it. Mechanical clocks were clearly being made in the early 1300s, yet not till 1364 did an Italian clockmaker named Giovanni D'dondi write a proper treatise on his craft.

3:06Giovanni's father, Jacopo D'dondi, was a clockmaker who'd built the earliest tower clock in Padua in 1344. Lewis Mumford said of the clock that it was the key machine of the modern industrial age. He called the appearance of this first automatic machine a prophecy that marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire. What D'dondi had called the glorious wheel was the doorway into our age of precision machines and high technology. I'm John Leighnhardt at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive lines work. This programming is sponsored by Metro, introducing the Ride Metro Fair card. The Ride Metro Fair system replaces the Metro Q Fair card for bus and rail fares, details at ridemetro.org slash fair system.