The first mechanical watch.
The first mention of mechanical clocks dates back to the end of the 6th century. Most likely, it was a water clock, in which a mechanical device was built to actuate additional functions, such as a battle mechanism.
Real mechanical watches appeared in the 13th century in Europe. They were not yet reliable enough, so you had to constantly check the time with a sundial. Their clockwork worked using the energy of a descending load, which for a long time was used as stone weights. To start such a clock, it was necessary to lift a very heavy weight to a considerable height.
It is worth noting that the mechanical clocks created in the 13th-14th centuries were very large and were rarely used. They were installed only in monasteries so that the monks could gather for service on time. It was the monks who decided to put 12 divisions on the circle, each of which corresponded to one hour. Only in the 16th century did clocks appear on city buildings.
In the XIV-XV centuries, the first floor and wall clocks were created. At first they were quite heavy, as they were powered by a load that had to be pulled up every 12 hours. Such clocks were made of iron, and a little later of brass, and in design they repeated the tower clock.
In the second half of the 15th century, the first clocks with a spring engine were created. The source of energy in such watches was a steel spring, which, during unwinding, turned the wheels of the clock mechanism. The first table spring clock was made by an unknown master from bronze. The height of this clock was half a meter.
The first portable spring clocks were made of brass and shaped like a round or square box. The dial of such watches was horizontal. Convex brass balls were placed on it in a circle, which helped to determine the time by touch in the dark. The arrow was made in the form of a dragon or other mythical creature.
Science continued to develop, and mechanical watches improved along with it. The first pocket watch appeared in the 16th century. Such devices were very rare, so only rich people could afford to purchase them. Very often, pocket watches were decorated with precious stones. But even then, the time continued to be checked by the sundial. Some watches even had two dials: mechanical on one side and solar on the other.
In 1657, Christian Huygens assembled a mechanical pendulum clock. They differed in extraordinary accuracy in comparison with all the instruments for counting time that existed at that time. If, before the appearance of the pendulum, clocks were considered accurate if they were lagging or hurrying by 30 minutes a day, now the error was no more than 3 minutes a week. In 1674, Huygens improved the spring watch regulator. His invention required the creation of a qualitatively new trigger mechanism. A little later, this mechanism was invented. They became an anchor.
Huygens' inventions were widely used in many countries. Watchmaking began to develop actively. The error of the clock was gradually decreasing, besides, it was possible to start the mechanisms once every eight days.
In connection with the increase in the accuracy of watches in 1680, the first mechanisms with a minute hand were created. At the same time, a second row of numbers for minutes appeared on the dial plate, which used Arabic numerals. And in the middle of the 18th century, watches with a second hand appeared.
At this time, the Rococo style dominated all forms of art. In watchmaking, his influence was expressed in the variety of watch forms and materials used, the abundance of carved patterns, scrollwork, external decorations made of gold and precious stones. At the same time, carriage clocks came into fashion. It is believed that the travel or carriage clock appeared thanks to the French mechanic and watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet.
Most often they were rectangular in shape with glass side walls. A brass handle was attached to the case from above, which served to carry the watch. All brass surfaces of the watch were coated with gold. It is worth noting that the appearance of the road clock has not changed much throughout the century.
Clockwork improvements in the second half of the 18th century made watches flatter and smaller. But, despite the changes in the appearance of watches, they still continued to be the prerogative of the elite. Only in the second half of the 19th century did they begin to be produced in large quantities in Germany, England, the USA, and also Switzerland.
Mechanical clocks have evolved for at least five centuries. Today they are conditionally divided not only by the type of clockwork (pendulum, balance, tuning fork, quartz, quantum), but also by purpose (household and special).
Household clocks include tower, wall, table, wrist and pocket watches. Specialized watches are divided depending on the purpose. Among them you can find watches for diving, signal, chess, anti-magnetic watches, and many others. The prototype of modern mechanical clocks is the pendulum clock of H. Huygens created in 1657.
Since ancient times, people not only existed in time, but also tried to comprehend its essence. What is time?
More than one generation of philosophers, astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, theologians, poets and writers is looking for the answer to this question, and each era has its own idea of the nature of time and how to measure it.
History of watches
The first simple device for measuring time - sundial- was invented by the Babylonians about 3.5 thousand years ago. No less common in Europe and China were the so-called "fiery" watches - in the form of candles with divisions applied to them.
Hourglass appeared about a thousand years ago. Many loose indicators of time are known to history, but only the development of glassblowing skills made it possible to create a relatively accurate device. However, with the help of an hourglass, it was possible to measure only small periods of time, no more than half an hour. In the Middle Ages, at first, with the help of mechanical tower clocks, only the time of prayer in monasteries was determined. But soon this revolutionary device began to coordinate the life of entire cities. Its history is as follows: the very first mechanical watches, which did not yet have a pendulum, were developed in the second half of the thirteenth century, where and when the first mechanical clocks appeared is not exactly known, but the oldest, although not documented reports of them, are considered to be references to the tenth century. 
The first church clocks were very large, with a heavy iron frame and several gears forged by local blacksmiths; they had neither a dial nor a clock hand, but simply struck a bell every hour. The first mechanical clock in Russia appeared in the 15th century. On watches of that time, instead of numbers, letters were applied to the dial. The first wearable watch was made in the second half of the fifteenth century by master Peter Henlein from the German city of Nuremberg, after the flat spring had been invented to replace weights. Their case, which had only one hour hand, was made of gilded brass and had the shape of an egg. The first "Nuremberg eggs" were 100-125 mm in diameter, 75 mm thick and were worn in the hand or around the neck. By the end of the nineteenth century, advances in science and technology had begun the mass production of mass-produced watches, making them more accessible to a wider audience. Since the widespread use of clocks, the problem of time synchronization and determining its most accurate value has become acute. Atomic clocks made it possible to solve this problem, where radio emission served as a source of oscillations instead of a pendulum. In general, since the invention of atomic clocks, their accuracy has doubled on average every 2 years, and although the limit to perfection in this matter is not visible to this day.
Sundial
- a device for determining time by changing the length of the shadow from the gnomon and et moving along the dial. The appearance of these watches is associated with the moment when a person realized the relationship between the length and position of the sun's shadow from certain objects and the position of the Sun in the sky. The simplest sundials show solar time, not local time, that is, they do not take into account the division of the Earth into time zones. 
Story
The gnomon was the oldest instrument for determining time. The change in the length of its shadow indicated the time of day. Such a simple sundial is mentioned in the Bible.
Ancient Egypt. The first known description of a sundial in ancient Egypt is an inscription in the tomb of Seti I dated to 1306-1290. BC. It speaks of a sundial that measured time along the length of the shadow and was a rectangular plate with divisions. At one end of it is attached a low bar with a long horizontal bar, which casts a shadow. The end of the plate with the bar was directed to the east, and the hour of the day was set according to the marks on the rectangular plate, which in ancient Egypt was defined as 1/12 of the time interval from sunrise to sunset. In the afternoon, the end of the plate was heading west. Tools made according to this principle have also been found. One of them dates back to the reign of Thutmose III and dates from 1479-1425. BC, the second is from Sais, he is 500 years younger. At the end they have only a bar, without a horizontal bar, and there is also a plumb-line groove to give the device a horizontal position. The other two types of ancient Egyptian clocks that measured time by the length of a shadow were clocks in which the shadow fell on an inclined plane or steps. They were deprived of the lack of hours with a flat surface: in the morning and evening hours, the shadow went beyond the plate. These types of clocks were combined into a limestone model kept in Cairo. 
Egyptian Museum and dated somewhat later than the clock from Sais. It consists of two inclined planes with steps, one of them was oriented to the east, while the other pointed to the west. Until noon, the shadow fell on the first plane, gradually descending the steps from top to bottom, and in the afternoon - on the second plane, gradually rising from bottom to top, at noon there was no shadow. A concrete implementation of the inclined plane type of sundial was the portable clock from Kantara, made around 320 BC. with one inclined plane, on which divisions were applied, and a plumb line. The plane was oriented towards the Sun.
Ancient China. The first mention of a sundial in China is probably the problem of the gnomon, given in the ancient Chinese problem book "Zhou-bi", compiled around 1100 BC. In the Zhou era in China, an equatorial sundial was used in the form of a stone disk installed parallel to the celestial equator and penetrating it in the center of a rod installed parallel to the earth's axis. In the Qing era in China, portable sundial with a compass was made: either equatorial - again with a rod in the center of a disk installed parallel to the celestial equator, or horizontal - with a thread in the role of a gnomon above a horizontal dial.
Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Skafis is the sundial of the ancients. Clock lines are applied on the spheroidal recess. The shadow was cast by a horizontal or vertical rod, or a ball in the center of the instrument. According to the story of Vitruvius, the Babylonian astronomer Berossus, who settled in the VI century. BC e. on the island of Kos, introduced the Greeks to the Babylonian sundial, which had the shape of a spherical bowl - the so-called scaphis. This sundial was perfected by Anaximander and Anaximenes. In the middle 
In the 18th century, during excavations in Italy, they found exactly such an instrument as described by Vitruvius. The ancient Greeks and Romans, like the Egyptians, divided the time interval from sunrise to sunset into 12 hours, and therefore their hour was of varying length depending on the time of year. The surface of the recess in the sundial and the "hour" lines on them were selected so that the end of the shadow of the rod indicated the hour. The angle at which the upper part of the stone is cut depends on the latitude of the place for which the watch was made. Subsequent geometers and astronomers came up with various forms of sundials. Descriptions of such instruments have been preserved, bearing the strangest names according to their appearance. Sometimes the gnomon casting a shadow was located parallel to the axis of the earth. The first sundial was brought to Rome by the consul Valerius Massala from Sicily in 263 BC. e. Arranged for a more southerly latitude, they showed the hour incorrectly. For the latitude of Rome, the first hours were arranged around the year 170 by Marcius Philippus.
Ancient Russia and Russia. In ancient Russian chronicles, the hour of some event was often indicated, which suggested that at that time certain instruments or objects were already used in Russia to measure time, at least during the day. Chernigov artist Georgy Petrash drew attention to patterns in the illumination of niches by the Sun in the northwestern tower of the Transfiguration Cathedral in Chernigov and to a strange pattern above them. Based on a more detailed study of them, he suggested that the tower is a sundial in which the hour of the day is determined by the lighting of the corresponding niche, and the meanders serve to determine the five-minute interval. Similar features were noted in other temples of Chernigov, and it was concluded that the sundial was used in Ancient Russia as early as the 11th century. In the 16th century, Western European portable sundials appeared in Russia. In 1980, there were seven such clocks in Soviet museums. The earliest of them date back to 1556 and are kept in the Hermitage, they were designed to be worn around the neck and are a horizontal sundial with a sector gnomon to indicate the time, a compass to orient the clock in the north-south direction and a plumb line on the gnomon to give the clock a horizontal provisions. 
Middle Ages. Arab astronomers left extensive treatises on gnomonics, or the art of building sundial. The basis was the rules of trigonometry. In addition to the "hour" lines, the direction to Mecca, the so-called qibla, was also applied to the surface of the Arabic clock. Especially important was the moment of the day when the end of the shadow of a vertically placed gnomon fell on the qibla line. Together with the introduction of equal hours of the day and night, the task of gnomonics has been greatly simplified: instead of noticing the place of the end of the shadow on complex curves, it has become enough to notice the direction of the shadow. If only the pin is located in the direction of the earth's axis, then its shadow lies in the plane of the hour circle of the sun, and the angle between this plane and the plane of the meridian is the hour angle of the sun or true time. It remains only to find the intersection of successive planes with the surface of the “dial” of the clock. Most often it was a plane perpendicular to the pin, that is, parallel to the celestial equator; on it, the direction of the shadow changes by 15 ° for every hour. For all other positions of the plane of the dial, the angles formed on it by the direction of the shadow with the noon line do not grow uniformly.
Water clock, clepsydra
- a device known since the time of the Assyro-Babylonians and ancient Egypt for measuring time intervals in the form of a cylindrical vessel with an outflowing stream of water. It was in use until the 17th century.
Story
The Romans had a water clock of the simplest device in great use, for example, they determined the length of the speeches of orators in court. The first water clock was built in Rome by Scipio Nazica. Pompey's water clock was famous for its gold and stone decorations. At the beginning of the 6th century, the Boethius mechanisms were famous, which he arranged for Theodoric and for the Burgundian king Gundobad. Then, apparently, this art fell, since Pope Paul I sent Pepin the Short a water clock, as an extreme rarity. Harun al-Rashid sent to Charlemagne in Aachen (809) a water clock of a very complex device. Apparently, a certain monk Pacificus in the 9th century began to imitate the art of the Arabs. At the end of the 10th century, Herbert became famous for his mechanisms, also partly borrowed from the Arabs. The water clocks of Orontius Phineus and Kircher, based on the principle of the siphon, were also famous. Many mathematicians, including in later times Galileo, Varignon, Bernoulli, solved the problem: "what should be the shape of the vessel so that the water flows out quite evenly." In the modern world, clepsydra is widely used in France in the television game Fort Boyard during the players' trials and is a turning mechanism with blue water.
In the Middle Ages, a water clock of a special device, described in the treatise of the monk Alexander, became widespread. The drum, divided by the walls into several radial longitudinal chambers, was suspended from the axle so that it could lower, deploying the ropes wound on the axle, that is, rotating. Water in the side chamber pressed in the opposite direction and, gradually overflowing from one chamber to another through small holes in the walls, slowed down the unwinding of the ropes so much that time was measured by this unwinding, that is, by lowering the drum.
Mechanical watches
- watches using a weight or spring energy source. A pendulum or balance regulator is used as an oscillatory system. The craftsmen who make and repair watches are called watchmakers. In art, mechanical watches are a symbol of time. Mechanical watches are inferior to electronic and quartz watches in terms of accuracy. Therefore, at present, mechanical watches are turning from an indispensable tool into a symbol of prestige.
Story
The prototype of the first mechanical clock can be considered the Antikythera mechanism dating back to about the 2nd century BC. The first mechanical clock with an escapement mechanism was made in Tang China in 725 AD by Yi Xing and Liang Lingzan. From China secret device, 
Apparently, he came to the Arabs. The first pendulum clock was invented in Germany around 1000 by Abbot Herbert, the future Pope Sylvester II, but was not widely used. The first tower clock in Western Europe was built in 1288 by English craftsmen in Westminster. Around the same time, Dante Alighieri talks about the chiming wheel clock in his Divine Comedy. The first mechanical clock in Western Europe, mounted on towers in order to accommodate the weight mover of their mechanism, had only one hand - the hour. Minutes were not measured at all then; but such clocks often celebrated church holidays. There was also no pendulum in such clocks. The tower clock, installed in 1354 in Strasbourg, did not have a pendulum, but noted: hours, parts of the day, holidays of the church calendar, Easter and the days depending on it. At noon, the figures of the three Magi bowed before the figure of the Virgin Mary, and the gilded rooster crowed and beat its wings; a special mechanism set in motion small cymbals that struck the time. To date, only a rooster has survived from the Strasbourg clock. The earliest tower clock mechanism that has survived to this day is in the cathedral of the English city of Salisbury, and dates back to 1386.
Later, pocket watches appeared, patented in 1675 by H. Huygens, and then - much later - wristwatches. In the beginning, wristwatches were only women's, jewelery richly adorned with precious stones, characterized by low precision. No self-respecting man of that time would put a watch on his hand. But the wars changed the order of things and in 1880 Girard-Perregaux began mass production of wristwatches for the army.
Quartz watch
- watches in which a quartz crystal is used as an oscillatory system. Although digital watches are also quartz watches, the expression "quartz watch" is usually only applied to electromechanical watches. The work of electromechanical clocks does not depend at all on the quality of the gears; a simple, if noisy, plastic alarm clock can cost less than $1. Quality household quartz clocks have an accuracy of ±15 seconds/month. Thus, they must be exhibited twice a year. However, the quartz crystal is subject to aging, and over time, the watch tends to rush. 
Story
Quartz watches were released in 1969. In 1978, the American company "Hewlett Packard" for the first time released a quartz watch with a microcalculator. It could perform mathematical operations with six-digit numbers. Its keys were pressed with a ballpoint pen. The size of these watches was several square centimeters. In the 1990s, original watches were introduced to the market - a hybrid of self-winding and quartz watches. Japan presented the Kinetic model from Seiko, and Switzerland presented the Autoquartz model from Tissot and Certina. The peculiarity of these watches was that they did not have a battery, but an accumulator, which was recharged by an automatic winding device, as is usually installed on mechanical watches.
Interesting about the watch.
*1485. Leonardo da Vinci sketched the fusee device for the clock tower. As it turned out, pocket watches differ from tower watches only in size - the principle is the same.
* The clock, which is based on a mechanism with an oscillating pendulum, was created by the Dutchman Christian Huygens. However, this became possible thanks to the experiments and research carried out by the famous mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1580.
*The invention of the pendulum around the beginning of the 15th century contributed to the emergence of the first home clocks, which were made by local blacksmiths and craftsmen. At first, home clocks were hung on the wall, because their pendulums were really huge. With the further improvement of watch mechanisms, watches became lighter and more compact, and their desktop version was soon created.
* Thanks to the invention of Galileo, the error in measuring time decreased from 20-30 minutes a day to 3 minutes, and the invention of the anchor mechanism made it possible to reduce this error to 3 seconds per week, which was considered a great accuracy.
*For the production of mechanical watches, which were the first samples, much more accurate machines were required than all the previous tools. Modern precision engineering was born from the skill of watchmakers' mechanics.
*The earliest date that can be relied upon for the use of spindle mechanical clocks is around 1340 or later. Since then, they quickly came into general use and became the pride of cities and cathedrals. In 1450, spring watches appeared, and by the end of the 15th century, portable watches, but still too large to be called pocket or wrist watches.
The history of watch creation is several thousand years old. Since ancient times, man has tried to measure time, first by day and night luminaries and stars, then with the help of primitive devices and, finally, using modern high-precision complex mechanisms, electronics and even nuclear physics.
The history of watch development is a continuous improvement in the accuracy of time measurement. It is authentically known that in ancient Egypt time was measured in days, dividing it into two periods of 12 hours. There is also evidence that the modern sexagesimal measurement model came from the Kingdom of Sumer around 2000 BC.
Sundial.
It is generally accepted that the history of clock creation begins with the invention of the sundial or the gnomon. With such watches it was possible to measure only daytime, since the principle of their operation was based on the dependence of the location and length of the shadow on the position of the sun.
Water clock.
The history of the creation of water clocks begins in ancient Persia and China around 2500 - 1600 BC. And from there, quite likely with trade caravans, water clocks were brought to Egypt and Greece.
Fire watch.
Fire clocks were used about 3000 years ago in China, during the time of the first emperor of this country named Fo-hi. Fire watches were common in Japan and Persia.
Hourglass.
The creation of the hourglass dates back to around the 3rd century BC during the time of the scientist Archimedes. Ancient Greece has long been considered the place of their invention, but some archaeological finds suggest that the first hourglasses were created by the inhabitants of the Middle East.
Mechanical watches.
The history of the creation of the first mechanical watch begins in 725 AD in China and is a significant event in the history of watch development. Although, even earlier, presumably in the 2nd century BC in Ancient Greece, a mechanism was created that allows tracking the positions of celestial bodies with great accuracy. This mechanism consisted of 30 gears placed in a wooden case, on the front and back sides of which there were dials with arrows. This ancient mechanical calendar can be defined as the prototype of the first mechanical clock.
Electric clock.
With the discovery of electricity, the history of the electric clock, invented in the middle of the 19th century, begins. The creation and further development of electric clocks put an end to the inconvenience of synchronizing time in different parts of the world.
In 1847, the world was presented with an electric clock developed by the Englishman A. Bain, which was based on the following principle: a pendulum swinging by means of an electromagnet periodically closed the contact, and an electromagnetic counter, which was connected by a system of gears to the clock hands, read and summed up the number of oscillations.
Atomic clock.
In 1955, the history of watch development took a sharp turn. Briton Louis Essen announced the creation of the first atomic clock on cesium-133. They had unparalleled accuracy. The error was one second per million years. The device began to be considered a cesium frequency standard. The standard of atomic clocks has become the world standard of time.
Digital Watch.
The beginning of the 70s of the 20th century is the starting point for the history of the creation and development of electronic watches that show time not with hands, but with the help of LEDs, which, although invented in the mid-20s, found practical application only decades later.
13/05/2002
The evolution of pendulum clocks lasted more than three hundred years. Thousands of inventions on the way to perfection. But only those who put the first and last point in this great epic will remain in historical memory for a long time.
The evolution of pendulum clocks lasted more than three hundred years. Thousands of inventions on the way to perfection. But only those who put the first and last point in this great epic will remain in historical memory for a long time.
TV clock
Before any news programs on television, we see a clock, the second hand of which, with great dignity, counts the last moments before the start of the transmission. This dial is the visible part of the iceberg called AChF-3, Fedchenko's astronomical clock. Not every device bears the designer's name, not all inventions are reported in encyclopedias.
The watch of Feodosy Mikhailovich Fedchenko was awarded this honor. In any other country, every schoolchild would know about an inventor of this level. And here, already 11 years ago, an outstanding designer quietly and modestly passed away, and no one even remembers him. Why? Probably, at one time he was stubborn, did not know how to flatter and hypocrisy, which the officials from science did not like so much.
Fedchenko helped invent the famous clock by chance. One of those mysterious accidents that so adorns the history of science.
The first two points in the history of pendulum clocks were set by two great scientists - Galileo Galilei and Christian Huygens, independently of each other, who created a clock with a pendulum, and the discovery of the laws of pendulum oscillation came to Galileo also by accident. A brick will fall on someone's head - and nothing, not even a concussion will occur, but for another, a simple apple is enough to wake up a thought dormant in the subconscious to discover the law of universal gravitation. Great accidents happen, as a rule, to great personalities.
In 1583, in the Pisa Cathedral, an inquisitive young man named Galileo Galilei was not so much listening to a sermon as admiring the movement of the chandeliers. Observations of the lamps seemed interesting to him and, returning home, the nineteen-year-old Galileo made an experimental setup for studying the oscillations of pendulums - lead balls mounted on thin threads. His own pulse served him as a good stopwatch.
So, experimentally, Galileo Galilei discovered the laws of pendulum oscillation, which are studied today in every school. But Galileo at that time was too young to think about putting his invention into practice. There are so many interesting things around, you need to hurry. And only at the end of his life, the old, sick and blind old man remembered his youthful experiences. And it dawned on him - to attach an oscillation counter to the pendulum - and you get an accurate clock! But the forces of Galileo were no longer the same, the scientist could only make a drawing of the clock, but his son Vincenzo completed the work, who soon died and the creation of pendulum clocks by Galileo did not receive wide publicity.
Subsequently, Christian Huygens had to prove all his life that it was he who had the honor of creating the first pendulum clock. On this occasion he wrote in 1673:
"Some say that Galileo tried to make this invention, but did not finish the job; these persons rather reduce the glory of Galileo than mine, since it turns out that I, with greater success than he, completed the same task."
It is not so important which of these two great scientists is "first" in the creation of clocks with a pendulum. Much more significant is the fact that Christian Huygens not only made another type of watch, he created the science of chronometry. Since that time, order has been put in place in the design of watches. The "horse" (practice) no longer ran ahead of the "locomotive" (theory). Huygens' ideas were brought to life by the Parisian watchmaker Isaac Thuret. This is how watches with various designs of pendulums invented by Huygens saw the light of day.
The beginning of the "career" of a physics teacher
Theodosius Mikhailovich Fedchenko, who was born in 1911, knew nothing about the passions of the pendulum of three hundred years ago. And he didn't even think about the clock. His "career" began in a poor rural school. A simple physics teacher was forced to become an unwitting inventor. How else, without proper equipment, to explain to inquisitive kids the fundamental laws of nature.
A talented teacher designed complex demonstration installations and, probably, schoolchildren did not miss his lessons. The war made an adjustment to the fate of the young inventor, Fedchenko became an outstanding mechanic of tank instruments. And here is the first bell of fate - after the end of the war, Feodosy Mikhailovich was offered a job at the Kharkov Institute of Measures and Measuring Instruments, in a laboratory where, among the scientific topics, the following was also recorded: "Searching for the possibility of increasing the accuracy of clocks with a free pendulum of the Short type."
His reference book was "Treatise on Clocks" by Christian Huygens. This is how F. M. Fedchenko met his famous predecessors Christian Huygens and Wilhelm X. Short in absentia.
The penultimate point in the history of pendulum clocks was set by the English scientist William X. Short. True, for a long time it was believed that it was impossible to create a clock with a pendulum more accurate than Short's clock. In the 20s of the XX century, it was decided that the evolution of pendulum time instruments was completed. Each observatory was not considered sufficiently equipped if it did not have Short's astronomical clock, but they had to pay for them in gold.
One copy of Short's watch was acquired by the Pulkovo Observatory. The English company that installed the time keeper forbade even touching them, otherwise it disclaimed any responsibility for setting up the cunning mechanism. In the 1930s, the Main Chamber of Weights and Measures in Leningrad was instructed to unravel the secret of Short's clock and begin to manufacture such devices on its own. The talented metrologist I. I. Kvanberg looked at the clock mechanism for a long time through the hermetic glass of the cylinder and tried, without drawings, to make a copy. The copy was good enough, but not perfect. It was impossible to see all the English subtleties through the glass. Nevertheless, before the war, several copies of Kvanberg's watches were produced at the Etalon factory.
Here is such a "simple" topic - to make a watch more accurately than Short did - and they entrusted the newcomer F. M. Fedchenko, who came to Kharkov after the war institute.
Back to the roots
The Kharkov craftsman established that back in 1673 Christian Huygens in his "Treatise on Clocks" said almost everything about how to make pendulum clocks. It turns out that in order for the clock to be accurate, it is necessary that the center of gravity of the pendulum in space describe not an arc of a circle, but part of a cycloid: a curve along which a point moves on the rim of a wheel rolling along the road. In this case, the oscillations of the pendulum will be isochronous, independent of the amplitude. Huygens himself, who theoretically substantiated everything, tried to achieve the goal by making thousands of inventions, but did not come close to the ideal.
The followers of Huygens, including Short, achieved accuracy in a different way - they isolated the pendulum as much as possible from external influences, placing an accurate clock deep in the basement, in a vacuum, where vibration and temperature change minimally.
Fedchenko, on the other hand, wanted to fulfill Huygens' dream and create an isochronous pendulum. They say everything perfect is simple. So Fedchenko just hung the pendulum on three springs - two long ones - on the sides and one short one - in the middle. It would seem nothing special, but on the way to discovery, there were thousands of experiments. Springs were tried thick and thin, long and short, flat and with a variable section. Five long years of patient and painstaking work, the disbelief of colleagues, they simply stopped paying attention to him, and suddenly a lucky break, thanks to an elementary mistake in the suspension assembly.
Several screws were screwed badly, and the suspension behaved in such a way that the pendulum began to make isochronous oscillations. Experiments were checked and rechecked, everything remained the same. The three-spring suspension of the pendulum solved the Huygens problem - when the amplitude of the oscillation changed, the period remained unchanged.
The capital, of course, lured away a talented inventor. In 1953, F.M. Fedchenko was transferred to Moscow, to the laboratory of pendulum instruments of the time of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Physical, Technical and Radio Engineering Measurements, which was being created.
Of course, Kharkov did not like it. Fedchenko was struck below the belt - they did not give up a high-precision imported machine, which cost a lot of money. The inventor brought to Moscow only three copies of the first experimental watch AChF-1. To continue the work, the machine was necessary; similar equipment was not sold in the shops of the country. With private traders, with difficulty, but it was possible to find the right machine, and Fedchenko found it. But how to pay? Cash was not issued in a state institution, especially such an amount - eleven thousand rubles.
Desperate Fedchenko, realizing that without precision equipment, he, as if without hands, went on a real adventure. He directly turned to the manager of the State Bank and found such convincing words about the significance of his invention that a smart and courageous person, a professional in his field, believing the master, gave him the required amount in cash, simply demanding a receipt as a document. This is one example of the "obvious but incredible".
For several decades, the mechanism of Fedchenko's astronomical clock was improved until the famous model - "ACHF-3" appeared, which brought fame to both the author and the country. High-precision clocks were demonstrated at the World Exhibition in Montreal, awarded with medals of VDNKh; watch descriptions are included in encyclopedias and in various serious publications on chronometry.
The brilliance and tragedy of Fedchenko's invention
F. M. Fedchenko - created high-precision electronic-mechanical pendulum clocks at a time when quartz, molecular and atomic time devices had already begun to appear. These systems cannot be compared. Each performs its specific tasks and is indispensable in its field. But, unfortunately, not everyone understands this. Theodosius Mikhailovich Fedchenko has never been deprived of the attention of scientists and his colleagues. But officials, on whom both the fate of the inventor himself and his inventions often depend, do not always know what they are doing.
The Gosstandart of the USSR treated the famous designer coolly. In 1973, VNIIFTRI offered to pay the inventor a worthy reward for more than twenty-five years of work on the creation of domestic astronomical clocks, which brought the country a huge economic benefit and independence from the import of precision watch movements. The Gosstandart considered it possible to cut the proposed reward by 9 times, referring to the fact that "the accuracy of the AChF-3 clock is lower than the current atomic clock." Of course below. But there is only one atomic clock for the whole country, they are served by a whole team of employees, this is the State standard of time and frequency, and Fedchenko's clock has a completely different purpose - it is time keepers. Until now, Fedchenko watches are equipped with many television centers, airports, spaceports, observatories.
Does anyone think of comparing the speed of a bicycle and a space rocket. And in Gosstandart they compared Fedchenko's pendulum clock, which gives an error of one second in 15 years, with atomic clocks, which are wrong by the same second in three hundred thousand years. You can only evaluate a system of a similar class. For example, Fedchenko's watch, compared to Short's, is much cheaper, more economical, more reliable, more convenient to use and much more accurate. Let's not pay attention to short-sighted and unscrupulous officials of all ranks. The main thing, let's remember, and we will be proud that our compatriot Feodosia Mikhailovich Fedchenko put the last point in the development of pendulum clocks. Listen to how proud it sounds - from Galileo and Huygens to Fedchenko!
The master, of course, knew his worth and knew that there would be spiteful critics who would try to belittle the significance of his invention. In order not to forget about the work of his whole life, Fedchenko himself came to the Polytechnic Museum in 1970 with a proposal to accept and exhibit watches of his design as a gift. Today, in the small hall of the Moscow Museum, you can see many masterpieces of watchmaking art, including watches - the inventor with a capital letter - Feodosy Mikhailovich Fedchenko
The history of watches goes back thousands of years.
The very first clock on earth was solar. They were ingeniously simple: a pole stuck into the ground. A time scale is drawn around it. The shadow of the pole, moving along it, showed what time it was. Later, such clocks were made of wood or stone and installed on the walls of public buildings. Then came the portable sundial, which was made of precious wood, ivory or bronze. There were even watches that can be conditionally called pocket watches; they were found during excavations of an ancient Roman city. This sundial, made of silver-plated copper, was shaped like a ham with lines drawn on it. The spire - the clock hand - served as a pig's tail. The hours were small. They could easily fit in a pocket. But the inhabitants of the ancient city have not yet invented pockets. So they wore such watches on a cord, chain or attached to canes made of expensive wood.
The sundial had one significant drawback: it could only "walk" on the street, and even then on the sunlit side. This, of course, was extremely inconvenient. That's probably why the water clock was invented. Drop by drop, water flowed from one vessel to another, and by how much water flowed out, it was determined how much time had passed. For many hundreds of years, such watches - they were called clepsydras - served people. In China, for example, they were used 4.5 thousand years ago. By the way, the first alarm clock on earth was also a water one - both an alarm clock and a school bell at the same time. Its inventor is considered the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who lived 400 years before our era. This device, invented by Plato to call his students to classes, consisted of two vessels. Water was poured into the upper one, from where it gradually flowed into the lower one, displacing air from there. Air through the tube rushed to the flute, and it began to sound. Moreover, the alarm clock was regulated depending on the time of year. Clepsydras were very common in the ancient world.
Sundial. Hourglass.
A thousand years ago, Caliph Harun al-Rashid ruled in Baghdad, the hero of many tales of the Thousand and One Nights. True, in fairy tales he is depicted as a kind and fair sovereign, but in fact he was treacherous, cruel and vindictive. The caliph maintained trade and diplomatic relations with the rulers of many countries, including the Frankish king Charlemagne. In 807, Harun al-Rashid gave him a gift worthy of a caliph - a water clock made of gilded bronze. The hand could show time from 1 hour to 12. When it approached the figure, a ringing sound was heard, which was produced by balls falling on a bronze sheet.
At the same time, figurines of knights appeared, passed in front of the audience and retired.
In addition to water clocks, sand and fire clocks (most often alarm clocks) were also known. In the East, the latter were sticks or cords made from a slowly burning compound.
They were placed on special stands and over the segment of the stick where the fire was supposed to come at a certain time, metal balls were hung low on a thread. The flame approached the thread, it burned out, and the balls fell with a clang into the copper cup. In Europe, for these purposes, they used a candle with divisions printed on it. A pin with a weight attached to it was stuck into the required division. When the candle burned down to this division, the weight fell on a metal tray or simply on the floor.
It is unlikely that there will be a person who will name the first inventor of mechanical watches. Such clocks are first mentioned in ancient Byzantine books (late 6th century). Some historians attribute the invention of purely mechanical clocks to Pacificus of Verona (early 9th century), others to the monk Herbert, who later became pope. He made a tower clock for the city of Magdeburg in 996. In Russia, the first tower clock was installed in 1404 in the Moscow Kremlin by monk Lazar Serbin. They were an intricacies of gears, ropes, shafts and levers, and a heavy weight chained the watch to its place. Such structures have been built over the years. Not only the masters, but also the watch owners tried to keep secret the secrets of the mechanism design.
The first personal mechanical watch was driven by a horse, and a groom monitored their serviceability. Only with the invention of the elastic spring did watches become comfortable and trouble-free. The first pocket watch spring was a pig's bristle. It was used by the Nuremberg watchmaker and inventor Peter Henlein at the beginning of the 15th century.
And at the end of the 16th century, a new discovery was made. The young scientist Galileo Galilei, observing the movement of various lamps in the Pisa Cathedral during the service, found that neither the weight nor the shape of the lamps, but only the length of the chains on which they are suspended, determines the periods of their oscillations from the wind breaking through the windows. He owns the idea of creating clocks with a pendulum.
The Dutchman Christian Huygens knew nothing about Galileo's discovery and repeated it 20 years later. But he also invented a new rate uniformity regulator, which significantly increased the accuracy of the watch.
Many inventors tried to improve watches, and at the end of the 19th century they became an ordinary and necessary thing.
In the 30s of the XX century, quartz watches were created, which had deviations of the daily rate of about 0.0001 seconds. In the 70s, atomic clocks appeared with an error of 10" 13 seconds.
Nowadays, many different watches have been created. The most common are wrist.
Modern clock.
Their dial is becoming more and more like the instrument panel of an airplane, or at least a car. In addition to the time of day, watches often show the month, date, and day of the week. Thanks to the waterproof watch, scuba divers will know the depth of the dive, as well as when the air supply in the cylinders runs out. Sometimes another indication is displayed on the dial - the pulse rate. There are solar-powered radio-controlled clocks. They allow a time deviation of 1 second from astronomical for 150 thousand years, automatically switch to seasonal and standard time. A wrist watch with a built-in TV set, a thermometer watch that measures air or water temperature, and a dictionary watch with 1,700 words have been created.
Modern alarm clocks have become more complex, more perfect. French mechanics, for example, designed such that at a given time they begin not only to ring, but also ... to dance: two wide legs, on which the mechanism is installed, rhythmically hit the table; can dance both tap and twist. There is an alarm clock for those who snore in their sleep. It looks like an ordinary soap dish, only it contains not soap, but a microphone, an amplifier and a vibrator. The device is placed under the mattress, and as soon as a person snores more than five times, the alarm clock starts shaking so that the sleeping person will definitely roll over from his back to his side - and the snoring will stop. There is an alarm clock for couch potatoes. At the appointed time, he pumps air into the chamber placed under the mattress, which swells up and ... throws the sleeper out of bed. In a word, inventive thought does not sleep...
