Today in our blog we will peek through history of an extraordinary clock. We owe a lot to the early Egyptian and one such invention is Water Clock. Ancient Egypt was the first civilization to invent a way to measure time. The Egyptian didn’t even invent the calendar, they were also behind what we now know as clock.
The Theory of water Clocks
A leaky container was filled with water and the passage of time was measured based on the change in the containers water level. Today, the ability to keep track of time seems to be taken for granted. One just simply needs to glance at a watch, clock, or mobile phone to know the exact time, even down to the nearest second. Prior to the invention of such battery-operated gadgets, time-keeping was done quite differently. Sundials would, of course, only function when there was sunlight, and they could not maintain a constant division of time. To compensate for these shortcomings, the water clock was invented. Although no one is certain when or where the first water clock was made, the oldest known example is dated to 1500 BC, and is from the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep I.
Around 325 BC, water clocks began to be used by the Greeks, who called this device the clepsydra (‘water thief’). One of the uses of the water clock in Greece, especially in Athens, was for the timing of speeches in law courts. Some Athenian sources indicate that the water clock was used during the speeches of various well-known Greeks, including Aristotle, Aristophanes the playwright, and Demosthenes the statesman. Apart from timing their speeches, the water clock also prevented their speeches from running too long. Depending on the type of speech or trial that was going on, different amounts of water would be filled into the vessels.