The Hourglass: An underrated invention (2013)

I was asking myself how people measured time before mechanical clocks, and I completely forgot about hourglasses.

I wonder if the development of mechanics was hindered by the lack of standardized time-keeping. I've read that Galileo used his own pulse to measure pendular motion, and I find that highly impractical.

The part of the article I was hoping to emphasize with the original title (IIRC it was Tamper-resistant time-keeping) was this:

the sandglass was the primary means of fair timekeeping. The sand glass was visible to all in a room, and it could only be dramatically and obviously “reset”, it couldn’t be fudged like a mechanical clock.

By virtue of being highly visible and slow to reset thus difficult to sabotage made it an ideal tool not just for time-keeping in general, but dedicating time to activities where fairness and equality were important. The simplicity of the mechanism hides the sophistication of its action - being an auditable accounting system.

If you're interested in this, the absolutely wonderful book "The Discoverers" by Daniel Boorstin goes into a lot of detail on how humankind discovered time and developed methods to keep time.

More here: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/synch.html

Put some water instead of sand, a small turbine in the neck, and you may have an interesting power generator. Perhaps a portable light bulb?