Ancient Calendars

Historically we have been able to gather only a little knowledge about the methods of time keeping in prehistoric eras, but we do know that in practically every culture just as today, people have been preoccupied with measuring and recording the passage of time. The celestial bodies of the Sun, Moon, Planets and Stars, have allowed ancient civilisations to create systems to provide a measuring of seasons, months, and years.

In Europe we have discovered archaeological finds which indicate that over 20,000 years ago scratched lines on sticks and bones, or carefully gouged holes were used as ancient calendars, believed by academics to demonstrate ways of indicating the days between phases of the moon, ‘lunar cycles’. Around five thousand years ago, the ancient Sumerians, in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (now in Iraq), had a highly developed system :

 

• each year was divided into months;

   

• each month consisted of thirty days;

   

• each day was divided into twelve periods (each period has been calculated to be roughly equivalent to two hours by today’s time measurement);

   

• each two hour period consisted of thirty parts (calculated to be roughly equivalent to four minutes by today’s measurement).

No written records exist relating to the ancient sacred site of Stonehenge, built over 4000 years ago in England (UK), but it has been suggested that the alignments indicate it was used to measure ’seasonal’ or ‘celestial changes’. It is believed that these measurements were used to inform the time setting of rituals and events, and possibly further used to indicate when crop planting, harvests or festivals could start.

The earliest Egyptian calendar known is believed to be based upon lunar cycles The ancient Egyptians later recognised, and it is thought discovered, the ‘Dog Star’ in ‘Canis Major’, which we now call ‘Sirius’. The Dog Star rose alongside the Sun every 365 days. It is believed from this the 365-day calendar was devised, with approximate dating of this development to 4236 BC. This is a significant date, as historians claim that this is probably the earliest recorded year in the history of time.

Approximately 2000 BC the ancient Babylonians formulated a system based on lunar cycles of;

• a year, calculated to be of 354-days duration;

   

• a year structured on 12 lunar months;

   

• the length of the month alternated, consisting of either a 29-day or 30-day period.

   

The Mayans, of Central America, however used a combination of influences to calculate their calendar. The year was devised according to journey of the Sun, the Lunar cycle and the planet Venus. This calculation produced two calendars; the first was of 260-days duration, and the second of 365-days. It is believed that this calendar influenced the development of the Mayan culture from around 2000 BC - 1500 AD. Examination of ancient records give 3113 BC as the date for Creation of the Earth. With scientific progress we now know that this is highly unlikely but perhaps Creation should be interpreted according to Mayan beliefs on the planet and the universe. The Mayan system was later used in sections of the great Aztec calendar stones.

The Mohammedan Calendar is known to have been in operation since the day of the Hegira’, 16 July, 662 AD. This calendar is made up of twelve lunar months, with each month calculated to twenty-nine days + twelve hours + forty-four minutes.

Other civilisations, like those in the Western hemisphere such as our own, adopted a 365-day solar calendar allowing a leap year every fourth year. The ‘Julian Calendar’ was introduced in 46 BC, fixing the year to 365 days, and as highlighted, including an extra day every fourth year. This was later modified for the ‘Gregorian Year’, also known as the ‘New Style’ which was introduced in 1582 (taken on in the British Isles as late as 1752). Pope Gregory XIII was responsible for its introduction and formulation, which gave rise to the standardisation of many Christian feast days.

The first of each month was known as the ‘Calends’ by the Romans, which is perhaps why the name given to describe the full cycle of the year is known as the ‘calendar’. This Roman term ‘calends’ is known to have meant ‘the coming together’, ‘the meeting’ of people, which always occurred on the first day of the month. The ‘Pontifex’, the head of the college of sacred priests, would then inform the people of which dates within the month were to be sacred, days given to festivals or the new moon.

‘Time is, time was, time’s past.’
Byron, Don Juan.

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Clocks

At best, historians know that 5000 - 6000 years ago, great civilisations in the Middle East and North Africa started to examine forms of clock-making instead of working with only the monthly and annual calendar. Little is known on exactly how these forms worked or indeed the actual deconstruction of the time, but it has been suggested that the intention was to maximise time available to achieve more as the size of the population grew. Perhaps such future periods of time were intented to benefit the community by allotting specific lengths of time to tasks. Was this the beginning of the working week?

 

‘For the next inn he spurs a main,
In hasts alights and scuds away -
But time and tide for no man stay.’

Somerville, The Sweet-scented Miser.

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Sun Clocks

With the disappearance of any ancient civilisation, such as the Sumerian culture, knowledge is also lost. Whilst we can but hypothesise on the reasons of why the equivalent to the modern wristwatch was never completed, we know that the ancient Egyptians were next to layout a system of dividing the day into parts, similar to hours.

‘Obelisks’ (tall four-sided tapered monuments) were carefully constructed and even purposefully geographically located we believe around 3500 BC. A shadow was cast as the Sun moved across the sky by the obelisk, which it appears was then marked out in sections, allowing people to clearly see the two halves of the day. Some of the sections have also been found to indicate the ‘year’s longest and shortest days’, which it is thought were developments added later to allow identification of other important time subdivisions.

Another ancient Egyptian ’shadow clock‘ or ’sundial’ has been discovered to have been in use around 1500 BC, which allowed the measuring of the passage of ‘hours’. The sections were divided into ten parts, with two ‘twilight hours’ indicated, occurring in the morning and the evening. For it to work successfully then at midday or noon, the device had to be turned 180 degrees to measure the afternoon hours.

The Egyptians also used the ‘Merkhet’, the oldest known astronomical tool, which is believed to have been developed around 600 BC. Two merkhets were used to establish a north-south line which was achieved by lining them up with the ‘Pole Star’. This enabled the measurement of night-time hours, when certain stars crossed the marked meridian. By 30 BC, ‘Vitruvius’ describes thirteen different sundial styles being used across Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy, inherently demonstrating how the development must have grown to be more complex.

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Water Clocks

‘Water clocks’ were among the earliest time keeping devices that didn’t use the observation of the celestial bodies to calculate the passage of time. The ancient Greeks, it is believed, began using water clocks around 325 BC. Most of these clocks were used to determine the hours of the night, but may have also been used during daylight. An inherent problem with the water|clock was that they were not totally accurate, as the system of measurement was based on the flow of water either into, or out of, a container which had markers around the sides. Another very similar form was that of a bowl that sank during a period as it was filled of water from a regulated flow. It is known that water clocks were common across the Middle East, and that these were still being used in North Africa during the early part of the twentieth-century.

In the Far East, mechanised ‘astronomical’ and ‘astrological’ clock-making is known to have developed between 200-1300 AD. In 1088 AD, ‘Su Sung’ and his colleagues designed and constructed a highly complex mechanism that incorporated a water-driven escapement, invented about 725 AD. It was over seven metres in height and had all manor of mechanisms running simultaneously. During each hour an observer could view the movement of a power-driven armillary sphere, constructed of bronze rings, an automatically rotating celestial globe, together with five doors that allowed an enticing glimpse of seeing individual statues, all of which rang bells, banged gongs or held inscribed tablets showing the hour or a special time of the day. The appearance and actions would have appeared similar to the automaton we know so well today.

 

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Europe

During the period of 500-1500 AD, the development of time measuring devices in Europe is known not to have improved in any great way technologically, relying mainly on the use of the sundial and principles of measurement used in ancient Egypt.

These dials were placed above doorways and indicated the midday and four ‘tides’ or times of the sunlit day. In the tenth-century, one English (UK) model showed the marking of the tides compensated for including seasonal changes caused by the Sun’s altitude.

In Italy, during the early-to-mid fourteenth-century, large mechanical clocks housed in towers began to appear in several of the large cities. These clocks appear to have been plagued by the same problem as that of the ‘water clock’, that of regulating the mechanisms and maintaining the accurate time. This appears to have been due to the oscillation period of the escapement depending on a driving force which had sufficient friction in the drive mechanism.

A technological advance came with the invention of the ‘Spring-powered’ clock, around 1500-1510, credited to ‘Peter Henlein’ of Nuremberg (Germany). These were instantly popular although the spring-powered clock did have one problem, that of slowing down when the mainspring unwound. In the sixteenth-century, and even through until the nineteenth-century, these clocks were mainly the reserve of the wealthy, when the reduced size meant it could now be put on a mantle shelf or table. The development of the spring-powered clock was the precursor to accurate time keeping.

The Mystic, Mystical-WWW.

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Mechanical Clocks

In 1656, ‘Christian Huygens’ (Dutch scientist), made the first ‘Pendulum|clock’, with a mechanism using a ‘natural’ period of oscillation. ‘Galileo Galilei’ is credited, in most historical books, for inventing the pendulum as early as 1582, but his design was not built before his death. Huygens’ clock ,when built, had an error of ‘less than only one minute a day’. This was a massive leap in the development of maintaining accuracy, as this had previously never been achieved. Later refinements to the pendulum clock reduced this margin of error to ‘less than 10 seconds a day’.

Huygens, in 1657, developed what is known today as the ‘balance wheel and spring assembly’, which is still found in some of today’s wrist watches. This allowed watches of the seventeenth-century to keep accuracy of time to approximately ten minutes a day. Meanwhile, in London, England (UK) in 1671, ‘William Clement’ began building clocks with an ‘anchor’ or ‘recoil’ escapement, which interfered even less with the perpetual motion of the pendulum system of clock.

‘George Graham’, in 1721, invented a design with the degree of accuracy to ‘one second a day’ by compensating for changes in the pendulum’s length caused by temperature variations. The mechanical clock continued to develop until they achieved an accuracy of ‘a hundredth-of-a-second a day’, when the pendulum clock became the accepted standard in most astronomical observatories.

 

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Quartz Clocks

The running of a ‘Quartz clock‘ is based on the piezoelectric property of the quartz crystal. When an electric field is applied to a quartz crystal, it actually changes the shape of the crystal itself. If you then squeeze it or bend it, an electric field is generated. When placed in an appropriate electronic circuit, this interaction. between the mechanical stress and the electrical field. causes the crystal to vibrate, generating a constant electric signal which can then be used for example on an electronic clock display. The first wrist-watches that appeared in mass production used ‘LED’, ‘Light Emitting Diode’ displays. By the 1970’s these were to be replaced by a ‘LCD‘, ‘Liquid Crystal Display’.

Quartz|clocks continue to dominate the market because of the accuracy and reliability of the performance, also being inexpensive to produce on mass scale. The time keeping performance of the quartz clock has now been surpassed by the ‘Atomic clock’.

 

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Atomic Clocks

Scientists discovered some time ago that atoms and molecules have ‘resonances’ and that each chemical element and compound absorbs and emits ‘electromagnetic radiation’ within its own characteristic ‘frequencies’. This we are told is highly accurate even over ‘Time and Space’.

The development of radar and the subsequent experimentation with high frequency radio communications during the 1930s and 1940s created a vast amount of knowledge regarding ‘electromagnetic waves’, also known as ‘microwaves’, which interact with the atoms. The development of atomic clocks focused firstly on microwave resonances in the chemical Ammonia and its molecules. In 1957, ‘NIST’, the ‘National Institute of Standards and Technology’, completed a series of tests using a ‘Cesium Atomic Beam’ device, followed by a second programme of experiments by NIST in order to have something for comparision when working at the atomic level. By 1960, as the outcome of the programmes, ‘Cesium Time Standards’ were incorporated as the official time keeping system at NIST.

The ‘Natural frequency’ recognized currently is the measurement of time, used by all scientists, defines the period of ‘one second’ as exactly ‘9,192,631,770 Oscillations’ or ‘9,192,631,770 Cycles of the Cesium Atom’s Resonant Frequency’. From the ‘Macrocosm’, or ‘Planetary Alignment’, to the ‘Microcosm’, or ‘Atomic Frequency’, the cesium now maintains an accuracy with a degree of error to about ‘one-millionth of a second per year’.

Much of modern life has come to depend on such precise measurements of time. The day is long past when we could get by with a timepiece accurate to the nearest quarter hour. Transportation, financial markets, communication, manufacturing, electric power and many other technologies have become dependent on super-accurate clocks. Scientific research and the demands of modern technology continue to drive our search for ever more accuracy. The next generation of Cesium Time Standards is presently under development at NIST’s ‘Boulder Laboratory’ and other laboratories around the world.

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Time Out

The only thing that should be remembered during all this technological development is that we should never lose the ability to tell the time approximately by natural means and the powers of deduction without requiring crutches to lean on.

From the Mystic’s point of view, time is and will now continue to be, dictated by computerised equipment which relies on the oscillation of frequencies in silicon chip technology. Computers, we have found, already challenge our lack of forethought in their design development, with continual revisions, and, as we find industry and commerce worrying about the advent of 31 December 1999, what changes will be made, implemented to the technology. What will the computers globally decide is the date as we move into a new century, as the computer only reads the last two digits in their internal time chips. Will it be 1 January 1900 or will it be 1 January 2000? Experts are still working on that one! What will happen to the economy, to security (as the banks may find their time coded computerised locks of little use), to our understanding of technology as we work towards that moment, and as the moment itself, should the systems fail to produce all the things we initially dreamt of ?

Our concept of TIME and using it together with TECHNOLOGY still has room for radical re-assessment in terms of man’s evolutionary thinking regarding our view of the past, our onward journey into the future and our concept of time in relationship to universe. With all this technology a very old ‘Earth’ proverb comes to mind:-

 

‘Time and tide wait for no man.’

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"http://www.mystical-www.co.uk"

‘Time is an illusion caused by the passing of linear history.’

Who does not remember the cosy tick of the "regulator" in grandmother’s parlour? These regulators are still popular today, with spring or weight movement, and are often reconstructed in plastic housings and fitted with quartz movements. The real regulator (without inverted commas) however was always a precision clock with a second pendulum, centralized second hand, weight movement and airtight housing. It was used to compare or regulate new clocks in clock factories, repairs in workshops, and marine chronometers or deck clocks in observatories.

However, regulators and "regulators" are not alone in the major field of large clocks. In Switzerland especially, there are also the famous Neuchâtel and Sumiswald pendulum clocks, then the southern German Black-Forest and Cuckoo clocks, in France the Morez|clocks, Cartels, "Oeil de Boeufs" and pictorial clocks, in Austria the beautiful "Laterndeluhren", in England and the USA all forms of wall-clocks and, last but not least, all the interesting electrical master clocks, mostly with electrical winding or electrical driven movement and 1/2, 3/4 or 1/1-second pendulum.

A wall-clock with a visible pendulum and simple or complex striking train onto bells or gongs has always been a living - and loved - interior ornament.

The following are some examples of wall-clocks with pendulum movements:

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Neuchâtel clock "ZENITH", wood, paint black and gold, 8 day, lever escapement, Switzerland, approx. 1960, hour and half-hour striking on a bell, total height : 85 cm, (Ref.: W-17857)

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Neuchâtel clock "ZENITH", wood, paint brown and gold, 8 day, lever escapement, Switzerland, approx. 1950, hour and half-hour striking on a bell, total height : 60 cm, (Ref.: W-27856)

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"Vienna Weight Regulator", Biedermeier style, Vienna, circa 1840, height: 140 cm, white, two-piece enamel dial, 8 day, lever escapement, "grande sonnerie" on two gongs (Ref.: W-93012)

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"Vienna Weight Regulator", art nouveau style, German, circa 1880, height: 110 cm, white, two-piece enamel dial, 8 day, lever escapement, Ref.: W-10981 Price: Euro 1250.–

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Bronze cast and mercury-gilt Cartel clock, France, circa 1860, height: 66 cm, white enamel dial with blue Roman numerals, 8 day, French movement with visible cast sun-shaped pendulum, hour and half-hour striking on a bell Ref.: W-41262 Price: Euro 1820.–

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Square wooden and glazed "Oeil-de-Boeuf", France, circa 1880, front with coloured inlays, glass dial marked: "Sargnon à Belleville", dimensions: 46 x 46 cm, square, 8 day French movement with pendulum, hour and half-hour striking on a gong Ref.: W-83914

The earliest form of alarm|clock was probably a big guy standing by a sundial waiting to shout: Oi - wake up!

Alarm is defined as a state of fear or heightened anxiety and comes from old Italian all arme - all arm - a call to arms. Nature makes wide use of alarm calls. The raucous shriek of angry birds echoes through every jungle alerting of danger. In any back garden a stalking cat can be thwarted by the shrill cries of a startled worm-puller. The cowboy guiding his wary pony across the prairie pulls up short at the warning quiver of a deadly rattlesnake - carrying its own alarm in its tail.

Humans have adopted and adapted many ways of providing alarms. Early man kept barking dogs to alert of approaching danger. Through the centuries guards blew horns, lit hill top beacons, sent smoke signals, flashed mirrors, fired gunshots, rang church bells and shot rockets to alert the tribe or army. Or just danced up and down.

Awareness of time and the need for a predictable alarm combines to produce the alarm clock. The farmyard cockerel with its regular, dawn-welcoming cock-a-doodle-doo is nature’s man-adopted alarm. Good enough if you are a peasant farmer living in harmony with the seasons but what if you need more accuracy? The big guy shouting probably gained promotion to the more genteel brass gong and hammer, but try carrying your portable beacon or church bells around whilst squinting up at the sun. You’ll soon see the need for precise, practicable, portable devices.

The clock rate is the fundamental rate in cycles per second (measured in hertz) at which a computer performs its most basic operations such as adding two numbers or transferring a value from one processor register to another. Different chips on the motherboard may have different clock rates. Usually when referring to a computer, the term "clock rate" is used to refer to the speed of the CPU.

The clock rate of a CPU is normally determined by the frequency of an oscillator crystal. The first commercial PC, the Altair (by MITS), used an Intel 8080 CPU with a clock rate of 2 MHz. The original IBM PC (c. 1981) had a clock rate of 4.77 MHz (4,770,000 cycles/second). In 1995, Intel’s Pentium chip ran at 100 MHz (100 million cycles/second), and in 2002, an Intel Pentium 4 model was introduced as the first CPU with a clock rate of 3 GHz (three billion cycles/second).

The clock rate of a computer is only useful for providing comparisons between computer chips in the same processor family. An IBM PC with an Intel 486 CPU running at 50 MHz will be about twice as fast as one with the same CPU, memory and display running at 25 MHz. However, there are many other factors to consider when comparing the speeds of entire computers, like the clock rate of the computer’s front side bus, the clock rate of the RAM, the width in bits of the CPU’s bus and the amount of Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 cache.

Clock rates should not be used when comparing different computers or different processor families. Rather, some software benchmark should be used. Clock rates can be very misleading since the amount of work different computer chips can do in one cycle varies. For example, RISC CPUs tend to have simpler instructions than CISC CPUs (but higher clock rates), and superscalar processors can execute more than one instruction per cycle.

[edit] History

In the early 1990s, most computer companies advertised their computers’ speed chiefly by referring to their CPUs’ clock rates. This led to various marketing games, such as Apple Computer’s decision to create and market the Power Macintosh 8100/110 with a clock rate of 110 MHz so that Apple could advertise that its computer had the fastest clock speed available — the fastest Intel processor available at the time ran at 100 MHz. This superiority in clock speed, however, was meaningless since the PowerPC and Pentium CPU architectures were completely different. The Power Mac was faster at some tasks but slower at others.

After 2000, Intel’s competitor, AMD, started using model numbers instead of clock rates to market its CPUs, dispelling the "megahertz myth" which it claimed did not tell the whole story of the power of its CPUs. In 2004, Intel announced it would do the same, probably because of consumer confusion over its Pentium M mobile CPU, which reportedly ran at about half the clock rate of the roughly equivalent Pentium 4 CPU.

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

[edit] See also

• Bit rate

• Clock recovery

• Clock signal

• Data transfer rate

• Instruction cycle

• Overclocking

• PR rating

Once, time passed people by, but time itself seems to have been bypassed as retailers emphasize factors other than the right time to sell clocks.

Clocks sometimes get lost in the shuffle as they straddle differing segments of the home business, being functional items but, to a significant and perhaps growing extent, decorative pieces as well.

Now, that’s not to say some people don’t want their clocks to be perfectly on time. Clocks linked by satellite to the United States government’s atomic clock are popular with the scientifically minded. For those who like accuracy but are a little lazy, Chancy Instrument has a clock that incorporates daylight savings time into its calculations. Rather than a satellite, its "Set and Forget" technology uses a microchip to incorporate time changes for wall and alarm clocks.

Increasingly, though, consumers want more features. For example, major Timex displays at Bed, Bath & Beyond and Linens ‘n Things recently offered alarm|clocks that provided soothing environmental sounds or played CDs.

Rita Preece

‘My Grandfather’s clock was too large for the shelf, So it stood ninety years on the floor… …And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.’

Do you remember that song? The grandfather|clock actually exists and the story it tells is a true one. In fact, it’s how the grandfather clock got its name.

The George Hotel is a 16th century coaching inn on the banks of the River Tees in Piecebridge, North Yorkshire, England.

In the late 19th century, the George Hotel was managed by the Jenkins brothers, a couple of bachelors. In the hotel lobby stood a long case clock which could always be relied on to keep good time.

Sadly, one of the brothers died suddenly and the clock began to lose time - at first just 15 minutes a day, then up to an hour a day and no clockmaker could repair it. The locals thought it no coincidence that when the other brother died at the age of ninety, the long case clock stopped, never to go again.

The hotel’s new manager left the clock exactly as it was in the lobby and in 1875 a visiting American songwriter heard the story of this amazing coincidence and came to the George Hotel to see the clock for himself. He told the story in a song and Henry Clay Work’s lyrics were published when he returned to America. Over a million copies of the song sheet, ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’ were sold.

And that’s how the grandfather clock got it’s name.

The George Hotel still stands on the banks of the River Tees in Piecebridge, North Yorkshire and offers reasonably priced accommodation. It has four poster beds, a bar and restaurant and an inglenook fireplace. It is a convenient base for exploring the North Yorkshire Moors and the Dales, as well as being a living piece of grandfather|clock history.

My Grandfather’s Clock

By Henry Clay Work

Copyright unknown

My Grandfather’s clock was too large for the shelf, So it stood ninety years on the floor. It was taller by half than the old man himself, Though it weighed not a pennyweight more.

It was bought on the morn of the day he was born, It was always his treasure and pride, And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.

In watching its pendulum swing to and fro, Many hours he spent as a boy. And in childhood and manhood the clock seemed to know, And it shared both his sorrow and joy.

And it struck twenty-four when he entered the door, With a blooming and beautiful bride, And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.

Ninety years without slumbering, tick, tock, tick, tick, It’s life seconds numbering, tick tock, tick, tock, And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.

My Grandfather said that of those he could hire, Not a servant so faithful he found. It wasted no time and it had one desire, At the end of the week to be wound.

And it stayed in its place, not a frown upon its face, And it’s hands never hung by it’s side, And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.

Now it rang an alarm in the still of the night, An alarm that for years had been dumb. We knew that his spirit was pluming in flight, That his hour of departure had come.

Still the clock kept its time with a soft and muffled chime, As we silently stood by his side, And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.

Ninety years without slumbering, tick, tock, tick, tick, It’s life seconds numbering, tick tock, tick, tock, And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.

About the author:

The author is a lover of grandfather clocks and will one day inherit her great-great grandfather’s long case clock. She hopes it doesn’t stop when its current owner dies.

The warm red glow of the old Colgate clock is the most vivid image of my drive into Louisville for my first night on the job more years ago than I want to admit.

So long ago that the Kentucky Home Life Building in which I worked — now barely a speck on the skyline — was then among the city’s taller buildings.

The radio station where I was a news reporter soon moved to bustling Fourth Street and opened a showcase studio. Then Fourth Street was closed to traffic and lost its most popular businesses and its magnetism.

But the big octagonal clock atop the Colgate-Palmolive Co. across the Ohio River in Clarksville, Ind., remained a comforting constant in a world of ever-changing urban silhouettes.

When I worked the night shift, the reflection of the clock’s giant hands in the swirling river currents waved to me as I left downtown and headed home. And when I began the pre-dawn morning drive-time shift — in the days before many autos were equipped with dashboard clocks — a quThis was the same clock that my father, as a young man, watched from a streetcar decades earlier, when he worked as a grocery clerk at an A&P store in western Louisville. The 40-foot diameter clock, with hands that weigh a total of more than 1,100 pounds, is still one of the world’s largest timepieces. A friend in troubled times

Leaving downtown Louisville in the hours between midnight and morning during the violence following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Colgate clock was among the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak and dangerous landscape.

And in the afterglow of good times — when the Pegasus Parade, Thunder Over Louisville, the Derby parties, The Great Steamboat Race and the Run for the Roses were over — the Colgate|clock was still wound up and running toward a new day.

When I moved to another city and returned several years later, the clock was where I had left it. And as our children filled the back of a station wagon, then a minivan, the nose smudges on the windows after trips downtown were always on the side by the river, where the clock and Belle of Louisville went hand-in-hand as favorite attractions.

In yesterday’s paper I read that time may be running out for the famous clock.

Colgate, the story said, plans to move its operations to plants in Mexico and Tennessee next year, and it is selling the Clarksville site. The company has declined to comment on plans for the clock. But historic preservationists placed it on the endangered list after access was denied to consultants who hoped to prepare a report that might open the way for its listing on the National Registry of Historic Places.

Landmark should be saved

Surely, in this era when cities and corporations are spending millions of dollars for recognizable images and brands to set their skylines and their names apart, the marvelous Colgate clock would seem a natural.

So let’s hope that someone who can help, and someone who shares the sentiments of many us that the clock should forever be a part of the Louisville-Southern Indiana skyline, will find a way to save it. If not at its current site, then someplace else on the riverfront, or even atop one of the bridges — where its hands can still wave to us in reflections from the river.

It’s the least we can do for old time’s sake.

Byron Crawford’s column appears on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at (502) 582-4791 or bcrawford@courier-journal.com. Comment on this column, and read previous columns, at www.courier-journal.com/byronick glance at the glowing red 28½-foot minute hand on the far shore told me whether I’d make it to work on time.

Kristy Annely

In some places, one might be able to find old men bent over tables with all of the knowledge, expertise and inventory of parts that are necessary to fix a broken or malfunctioning cuckoo|clock. For those of us who don’t have the time or desire to seek out such eccentric craftsmen, the Internet has become a haven for locating and purchasing any of the hundreds of individual minute pieces that make up a Black Forest cuckoo clock. You may find, however, that purchasing small replacement parts and having them shipped to your house is more expensive than the total cost of replacing your worn cuckoo clock with a new one.

For those who have become attached to their old clocks, however, and also for those interested in creating their own working cuckoo clocks, the Internet holds a wealth information regarding parts, suppliers and the construction of the inner workings of cuckoo|clocks, from the simplest to the most elaborate.

One key site for these types of purchases, clockworks.com, is a well-known supplier of clock|parts to the repair industry. There you can find books on the history of almost any timepiece, manuals detailing the intricacies of their construction and almost all of the necessary parts to keep your cuckoo clock running perfectly for a long, long time. Working from pictures of the individual parts, clockworks.com makes it simple and easy to find the exact part you need, be it what actually imitates the sound of the cuckoo bird or what keeps accurate time. From bushings to bellows, from hands, to numerals, to special cuckoo epoxy, everything can be found and ordered directly from this site. Should you have any questions, clockworks.com will quickly respond to your emails or phone calls with precise, accurate information regarding your request.

Short of getting on a plane from wherever you may be located and flying for hours into the Black Forest of Germany, renting a car, and traveling to one of the small towns dotted throughout the area to find the manufacturer of your particular cuckoo clock, the internet is the single best resource to find the parts necessary to keep your cuckoo clock running perfectly.

About the author:
Cuckoo Clocks Info provides detailed information on Black Forest, antique, and quartz cuckoo clocks, as well as parts, repair, movement, kits, manufacturer reviews, and advice on where to purchase discount clocks. Cuckoo Clocks Info is the sister site of Grandfather Clocks Web.

Kristy Annely

Of all the various kits available from hobby stores and websites across the Internet, cuckoo clock kits are very rare indeed. Why is this? Two reasons: one is that as simple the cuckoo clock’s design may seem (after all, it was invented in 1730), it is actually very complicated and can only be replicated by masters. Minor defects in construction will render the movement meaningless with regard to telling accurate time. There is then the added difficulty of the simulated cuckoo sound.

As easy as it is to assemble finished parts at a company that has been doing it for a few hundred years, it’s very difficult for a beginner to achieve the same success – even when using the same parts. Also, since most of the artistry that draws people to appreciate the cuckoo clock is the look and sound of the finished product, there is no way to create a hand carved, artistic finished cuckoo clock and then disassemble it so somebody else could put it together. It simply cannot be done.

But rest your fears. For the ambitious cuckoo|clock enthusiast there remains one way to create a totally unique cuckoo|clock on your own. The company clockworks.com specializes in selling parts for all clocks, cuckoo|clocks included, can sell you all of the individual parts you will need to create the inner workings of a basic cuckoo|clock. You’ll pay quite a bit more then you would if you were simply to buy a finished cuckoo clock but that isn’t what you’re looking for, now is it?

You want to put it together yourself, and with the parts from clockworks.com you can do just that. The only problem is once you’ve got the inner workings you’ll actually have to do the artistic part yourself as well. You’ll have to sculpt a bird to emerge from the wooden doors and enough exterior decorations to satisfy yourself that you’ve done a Black Forest-worthy job. It can be done, but don’t expect a cuckoo clock in a box to come landing on your doorstep. You’ll have to become a master craftsman yourself.

About the author:
Cuckoo Clocks Info provides detailed information on Black Forest, antique, and quartz cuckoo clocks, as well as parts, repair, movement, kits, manufacturer reviews, and advice on where to purchase discount clocks. Cuckoo Clocks Info is the sister site of Grandfather Clocks Web.

Kristy Annely

The inside mechanics of cuckoo|clocks maintain virtually the same design since the day they were first created in the Black Forest of Germany. While the parts are now sometimes made out of metal and plastic instead of the all wood versions that started it all, the weights and counterbalance mechanisms that help them perform accurately and to imitate the sound of the cuckoo bird have not changed much in almost 300 years. A mechanical movement run by weights that hang from the bottom of the clock drives the action of most cuckoo clocks. Most clocks have three weights, while some larger more complex versions require three weights hanging from the front of the cabinet. They are commonly in the shape of pinecones and must be pulled periodically, depending on the model. Spring-driven cuckoo clocks never really caught on and subsequently are quite rare.

Black Forest cuckoo clocks run on a set of wheels that lock gears and provide the power necessary to swing the pendulum back and forth. Every time the pendulum makes a complete swing back and forth, one tooth of the wheel is released from the escape wheel. Each time a tooth escapes, the time train moves forward, resulting in a very small movement of the minute hand. When you first bring your new cuckoo clock home you will need to test its timing against a battery operated clock of some kind. If you measure the difference in time between your cuckoo|clock and “real” time, you can then adjust your cuckoo clock to perform more accurately by adjusting the weights that hang beneath the housing. It’s always an educated guess rather than an exact science, and old fashioned cuckoo|clocks are never one hundred percent accurate, but patience and readjustments made every twenty four hours over a few days will get your clock functioning as close to perfection as possible. The standard rule of thumb is to try to get your clock to miss only a few minutes per week and live with it.

About the author:
Cuckoo Clocks Info provides detailed information on Black Forest, antique, and quartz cuckoo clocks, as well as parts, repair, movement, kits, manufacturer reviews, and advice on where to purchase discount clocks. Cuckoo Clocks Info is the sister site of Grandfather Clocks Web.