Clocks and Culture by Carlo Cipolla

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

I recently finished reading Carlo M. Cipolla's short tome Clocks and Culture: 1300-1700 and was a bit disappointed. I bought it expecting to understand how the introduction and proliferation of clocks affected daily life in Western Europe but got something very different.

Don't get me wrong, it is not the case that his book is uninteresting, but rather that it's more of an economic history than a cultural one which makes the title all the more confusing. The focus here is on horology as a craft and how it developed over time. The ancients had water clocks and fire clocks (I presume a fire clock is a candle with a known and rather uniform rate of melting.) but it was the mechanical clock which arose in the second half of the 13th century where things really take off.

At first only your local liege could afford one. Besides, they were huge so you didn't want to transport them too far. As time wore on, technology advanced. Clocks became smaller and more affordable. Horology went from being a field dominated by singular artisans (think da Vinci) to a one where division of labor dominated. Instead of one guy designing and building the contraptions, you had an engineer design one, smiths make the parts, and, at sucking hind teat, assemblers assembling them. Cipolla goes into how the centers of clockmaking in Europe shifted. Early on the Italians were at the forefront. Then it was the Germans and the Swiss. Later the Dutch and the English had most of the renown.

Interestingly, clockmakers often moved to where there was work. I got the feeling that medieval people, while not as mobile as we are today, traveled and moved about a lot more than we generally think they did. Well, some of them, anyway.

So that's the first half of the book. The second half describes the reception of mechanical clocks in China and Japan. In the Orient clocks were a novelty owned by the rich. They weren't installed in towers and had no practical value for a long time. Cipolla offers some explanation but concedes that there is no easy answer to the question of why the West went and organized everything in life around them while the East did not.

I did learn, however that Europeans sold pornographic clocks to the Heavenly Kingdom. Just imagine some mandarin presenting a big phallic timepiece or some pudendum shaped clock to his master.

As I said above, the book doesn't really address the issue of people used to a day consisting of the time between sunrise and sunset suddenly having to contend with uniform lengths of time. Ergo I'll have to keep looking for a book that does.