The passage of time
Our podcast editor ELLIE CAWTHORNE discusses a recent episode on the 40,000-year history of timekeeping, from ancient bones to the modern wristwatch
Being able to accurately tell the time is such a fundamental part of modern life that it’s easy to forget just how transformative it has been. But speaking to watchmaker and restorer Rebecca Struthers on the podcast recently was a good reminder of how clocks, watches and other marvellous creations have revolutionised societies’ perception of time through history.
Struthers provided me with a potted history of timekeepers, beginning with the earliest contender – a 40,000-year-old bone found in a cave in the Lebombo mountains on South Africa’s eastern border. “It’s about the size of a little finger, with 29 notches, alternating between 30 spaces, which works out to a lunar calendar,” says Struthers. “We’ll never know for sure that was its intended use, but its creation looks very deliberate.”
From this, we moved on to sundials, sand timers and clepsydras, or water clocks. “What is incredible is that clepsydras appear across the world at around the same time, from north Africa and China to Europe and North America,” says Struthers. And, by the ninth century, Alfred the Great was using candle clocks to divide his days into neatly measured chunks of work, sleep and study.
Many of these objects were not just about function, but also spectacle – 12th-century Islamic polymath Ismail al-Jazari created a magnificent water clock shaped like a life-size Asian elephant.
Magnificence aside, the real revolution came from making timekeepers portable – and affordable. “I like to say that clocks are bystanders to history, but watches are active participants,” Struthers told me. In 19th-century factories, cheap watches caused a storm when workers began to realise overseers had been fiddling their shift hours. But while “even cowboys wore pocketwatches” (held in the mini pocket that’s still in jeans today), wristwatches took longer to catch on.
The first documented person to wear a so-called ‘armwatch’ (encrusted with jewels) was none other than Queen Elizabeth I, and “for a long time, wristwatches were almost exclusively worn by women”, Struthers explained. “It wasn’t until the First World War that it was deemed more convenient for men to have the time on their wrist rather than in their pocket. But it’s funny to imagine a time when James Bond wouldn’t be considered masculine for wearing a wristwatch.”
Listen now
You can hear this episode at historyextra.com/watchmakers-pod