Clock History
The James Burke television series Connections (first aired in 1978) still holds up as one of the most entertaining ways to understand how technology actually changes the world: not in isolated “inventions,” but through chains of needs, accidents, and clever re-purposing. In the clock-focused episode, Burke follows timekeeping from medieval Europe’s daily routines all the way to precision manufacturing—one of the hidden foundations of modern industry and, ultimately, computing.
Episode: Connections, Season 1, Episode 5 — “The Wheel of Fortune.”
Burke begins with a problem that sounds simple but turns out to be revolutionary: if society is going to coordinate work, worship, trade, and navigation, it needs a dependable way to measure time. He traces how astronomical and astrological knowledge moved through the medieval world, then lands in Europe where monasteries needed reliable “alarm clocks” for prayer. That demand helped drive early mechanical solutions—crude by today’s standards, but world-changing in their consequences.
From there, the story accelerates through the great leap of the Christiaan Huygens pendulum clock (1656), which made accurate timekeeping practical in everyday life, not just as an astronomical ideal. Burke then points out an earlier turning point you can still appreciate mechanically today: the verge-and-foliot escapement, one of the earliest true “engines of regular motion.”
That’s the same family of escapement you’ll see in our dramatic “rock clock” reproduction—now listed as the nci ww 7640 – Hohenzollern. It’s a vivid reminder that early clocks weren’t built to be perfectly accurate—they were built to make time legible and repeatable, which is the real beginning of the modern schedule.
In the second segment, Burke widens the lens from “how do you keep time?” to “what does accurate time make possible?” Along the way he touches on power storage and regulation (including the fusee idea in spring-driven work), and then pivots into the deeper theme of the episode: once you can measure and repeat reliably, you can standardize. Standardization becomes precision machining; precision machining becomes interchangeable parts; and interchangeable parts become scalable production—one of the core reasons the U.S. became an industrial force. That same logic of repeatable steps and reliable output is also part of the long road to automation and computing.
If you want a practical “clock-nerd” companion to Burke’s tour, take a look at our modern collections of 8-Day Musical Cuckoo Clocks, where you can see how a timekeeping train coordinates with a music mechanism—another miniature example of sequencing and control.