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Timekeeping Before Clocks
Timekeeping before clocks
We’ve trained ourselves to ignore the rhythms of nature — the rising and setting of the sun, for example — and even our own bodies — I can’t eat yet, it’s not lunchtime — substituting instead the ticking of a clock (or, in Plautus’ case, the shadow on a sundial). Some of the coolest designs for water clocks can be found in the work of Al-Jazari, an inventor who served in the court of a small Islamic kingdom in what’s now northern Iraq in the late 1000s and early 1100s. His greatest achievement was a 40-foot tall clock tower where the movement of water rotated a large, several-ton globe and animated little characters who appeared to announce the time by ringing bells.
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