As I have mentioned before, I am writing a historical fiction novel set in 1520s Nuremberg about a woman trying to keep her father’s clockmaking shop in her hands while also advancing the state of early modern prosthetics. Think Hangman’s Daughter crossed with Radium Girls. I chose Nuremberg at that time because it is a fascinating place. Much of the reformation happens there, it is tied up in a lot of the early modern moves toward capitalism and away from feudalism, and it was something of a technological hotbed. One of the areas it led the way in was, appropriately enough, clockmaking.
I have on my calendar, for my sins, and because apparently my calendar is not so much a record of when I am available as a suggestion as to how best inconvenience me, five times during the remainder of the week when I am scheduled for multiple meetings at the same time. I have two meetings that start or end on the quarter hour and one that lasts twenty minutes. (As an aside, before scheduling a meeting always ask yourself: could this meeting have been an email, could this email have been a chat message, could this chat message have been an emoji, could this emoji have been a thought you kept to yourself). The modern world slices and dices time to within an inch of its life. My phone nags me to pick a consistent bedtime, and my wife’s smart watch “reminds” her when she should sit, stand, walk, etc. This obsession with micro-managing time is a very much a function of modern capitalism, but the first personal time pieces expressed time very differently.
Time used to be measured by the sun and the stars. People would wake at sunrise, go to bed soon after the sun went down and very often rise in the middle of the night for a few hours before going back to sleep. As livelihoods became more tied to commerce and doing work outside of agriculture, more dependent upon coordinating with others, slicing time became more important. Clocks had always existed, of course, but the modern era began to see efforts to make them consistent, less reliant on the sun, and reliable across devices.
Nuremberg’s craftspeople were already known for making mainspring clocks and somewhere in the early 1500s a man named either Peter Henlein or Hele is credited with creating the first portable clock. He did this possibly on the run after killing a man in a tavern brawl, because everyone in the past was apparently a drunken murderer. These portable clocks eventually became known as Nuermerg Eggs because they came from Nuremberg and looked like eggs. Technologists are well known for their creative naming.
Actually, as good a story as that is, it is more likely the egg name came from a mistranslation of the German word for little clock. These were amazing pieces of engineering. Given the time period, shrinking down a mainspring and the associated mechanisms to a size that allowed them to be worn in pockets, around your neck, or on your wrist is amazing. They would have been working with tools and parts sometimes measured in millimeters.
The watches themselves only had hour hands, an interesting comment on the relative importance of time. Assuming these were not just ornaments for rich people, the idea that an hour hand alone would suffice to tell time marks just how different the concept of on time would have been. How you measure something changes how you interact with it, after all. A world in which the most granular level of accurate time is an hour is a much different word than one where the most accurate level of granularity is a second, or even less.
I would think it is slightly slower, more focused on longer time frames, slightly closer to the natural time than the modern world. When you measure in hours, it is easier, I think, to give more time for work to be completed, to allow space for craftsmanship. I could be romanticizing somewhat, of course, but it seems to me that people who only had an hour hand would not live life three simultaneous meetings at a time.
Let me clear: the past was mostly terrible. I chose to write about a woman in 1520s Nuremberg because that was a time period of great religious, political, technological, and economic change. Not all of that change was positive, though. The reason a story about a woman attempting to keep a shop under her control was that doing so was so difficult and becoming more so as the capitalism and Protestantism grew in influence. The past is a country generally best emigrated from. But that doesn't mean everything in the past was terrible. We could, perhaps, have taken some of the more relaxed notions of time with as we left.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have three meetings to attend.