So now we have the Clepsydra incorporated with hour glasses which have now turned ancient time into units of measure … the hour, IF everything went smoothly. Unfortunately these modern marvels of tracking time in ancient days needed to be attended to, be it water for the Clepsydra or simply someone to turn over an hour glass. The “human element” … the bane of man’s existence Really though, think about it for minute, it seems to me that most of man’s time (pun intended) spent on mechanizing time is to remove the fallibility of man himself. No less true in the next step in the “History of Time”. In the late 12th early 13th century mechanical clocks appeared simultaneous in Great Britain and France. I’ll let someone else split the hairs of who came first. It is not really known who gets credit for the development of mechanical time but with the onset of time being counted by oscillations, a new day had dawned for keeping track of time in way that seems familiar to us today … that is to say, a round dial broken up into 12 and occasionally 24 hourly segments. No more inaccuracies due to the watchman falling asleep or just having bad timing … sort of ironic that a watchman would actually cause inaccurate time keeping “Off with their heads” I say … or better yet, the dawn of mechanical clocks and bells (for alarms). Many of the movement parts of these early mechanical clocks are still being used today in our timepieces. We will discuss of some of those at another time under “Watch Definitions”. Until then …