Methods of measuring time, on the other hand, have been honed and perfected. Highly complex atomic clocks and sophisticated wristwatches are a reflection of our deep-seated need to keep our fingers on the elusive pulse of time.

Time is what you never have enough of, Stephen Hawking is said to have replied to a journalist’s question. In his writings, of course, the British physicist offers a more scientific take on time: “The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.” In simple terms, it means that we remember what has gone before but not what is still to come, that football matches don’t begin at the final whistle but with a kick-off, and that the Neanderthals are our distant forebears rather than being our descendants.

For today’s harried societies, time has become a luxury commodity – the most precious asset of all. We can do is take time. But where do we take it from when, day after day, we keep hitting the 24-hour barrier? By measuring time, we gain at least a sense of keeping track of this intangible phenomenon with every glance at a clock or watch. And that is where the fascination with timepieces seems to lie, namely in dividing a continuum up into tangible segments – hours, minutes and seconds. To achieve that, no effort or expense seems too great for us – which is quite astonishing, considering we have no idea as to who or what is responsible for creating time. Was it the god Aion of the Persian mystery cult, who lived in a cave deep in the earth, entwined by a snake eating its tail as a symbol of eternal time? Is it possible that the physical laws of our universe were different at the beginning of time from what they are today? Why does time pass at the rate it does, not faster or slower? Perhaps it isn’t constant and we simply aren’t aware of it. Speculations about time are just as diverse as the means of measuring. Horological instruments abound like grains of sand on the seashore. Take the hourglass, among the most basic of timekeepers. It’s not very accurate, but it is simple to use. A precisely measured quantity of particles – tin, lead or marble grains – drizzles through a narrow aperture from one glass bubble into another. The scale engraved on the side of the hourglass tells how much time has elapsed. Churches had pulpit hourglasses consisting of a frame with four glass containers marking 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes respectively, designed to ensure the sermon did not overrun its allotted time. Then there were pulse clocks for physicians and sandglasses for ship’s captains, where all the grains passed through in fifteen seconds. Greater accuracy than that was not achievable, though it was sufficient to determine a ship’s cruising speed. Hourglasses are relatively recent inventions, going back only to the 13th century. A far older and more practical way of measuring time was by means of the Sun in conjunction with a vertical stick or column. For all ancient peoples, the sundial was the first step along the complex path of timekeeping. It was inspired by the observation that an upright person casts a shadow on the ground, the length of which varies according to the time of day. Early civilisations soon refined this archaic method of telling the time by linking the shadow cast by a vertical rod on a flat surface to an empirically calculated time scale, thus creating a chronograph. The most famous examples of this are the temple obelisks of the ancient Egyptians, which go back more than 3,000 years. Equally sophisticated, but on a much smaller scale, were pocket sundials used by upper-class Egyptians during the time of the Pharoahs. These consisted of horizontally arranged metal strips from which hung a perpendicular thread. The shadow cast by it gave the time to within a few minutes.

Another continent, another era. On the Yucatan peninsula, in the tropical rainforest of Central America, is an ancient temple complex called Chichen Itza. It was once the capital of the mighty empire of the Mayas. They were succeeded by the Toltecs, who came from the Mexican unplands, rebuilt the city, and brought about its cultural flowering. In 1875 the French archaeologist Auguste Le Plongeon came across the remains of this ancient city with its pyramid of the snake god Kukulkan, proved a sensational discovery. Measuring 30 metres high and 55 metres wide along its base, it is not only the most imposing structure in the entire complex but also the biggest clock in the world. For the Mayans, Kukulkan was the first mathematician, as well as the inventor of writing and astronomy. Not until the 20th century was the profound knowledge and ingenuity behind this construction fully appreciated. Four staircases of 91 steps, one on each side of the pyramid, lead up to a temple. Counting the upper platform, that makes 365 steps in all – the number of days in a year. At the same time, the steps of each staircase indicate the days between the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes. On these last two days, March 21st and September 23rd, the setting Sun delivers a high-precision spectacle on the north staircase when triangles of light and shadow create the illusion of a fifty-metre snake coiling down the steps of the pyramid to the stone snake’s head at the foot of the staircase. This dramatic image of the god Kukulkan remains visible for three hours until the Sun drops below the horizon and the reptile of light disappears into the earth. It marks the point when the falling night and the following day are of equal length. Such phenomena are described as wonderworks. Their creators are said to have been obsessed with capturing, measuring and marking the intangible medium of time.

For some, such wonderworks can turn into their life’s work. That was the case with a man by the name of Jens Olsen, born in Denmark in 1872. At the age of 25 he travelled around Europe, and among the places he visited was Strasbourg, where he admired the famous astronomical clock in the cathedral. This mechanical marvel from a past era inspired him to start making his own drafts and calculations, filling jotters with construction plans and endless columns of figures before finally, in retirement, getting down to building his own astronomical clock. By the time King Frederik IX set his masterpiece in motion on 15th December 1955, the freestanding timepiece consisted of no fewer than 15,448 individual components housed in a fine mahogany cabinet. It stands in Copenhagen’s City Hall. Twelve movements drive this filigree construction, which shows actual solar time, the time of sunrise and sunset, the star map over Denmark, and the difference between local and solar time. A special dial also gives the local time at any point around the globe, along with the lengths of day and night. This monumental display is complemented by a perpetual calendar showing the twelve months of the year and the days of the week, as well as eclipses of the Sun and Moon and the orbits of the planets around the Sun. The clock is designed to run for the next 2,500 years. Constructed like a winged altarpiece, it measures time by the Gregorian as well as the obsolete Julian calendar. It means historians can use this conversion tool to pinpoint historical data from the Julian era in terms of the Gregorian calendar, down to the precise day. But what do we mean by precise? How accurately can time be measured? What happens if you split a second into two halves and split these halves in turn, and so on down to the millionth and billionth degree? Does it come to an end at some point, or can this division of time go on forever? Scientists and philosophers have long grappled with that question, and come up with very different results.

To date, the shortest space of time that can be measured is one 9,192,631,770th of a second. This fleeting moment is the time it takes a caesium atom to make the transition between two energy states. It is the interval used by laboratory-standard caesium atomic clocks – with an accuracy of one second in 1,400,000 years – to measure time. They are obviously more accurate and constant than the most precise pendulum clock and even more accurate than measuring the rotation of the Earth. That was long regarded as the measure of time until, with the help of the atomic clocks just described, horologists realised that the earth’s timekeeping was not as reliable as previously thought. The reason is that the Earth does not revolve as smoothly as was generally imagined right up until the middle of the last century. The Moon, the tides and the winds all affect the Earth’s rotation. Even the profuse growth of foliage in spring and its shedding in autumn are said to influence the distribution of masses in this cosmic spinning top and render its movements irregular. The most sophisticated and accurate atomic clocks aren’t for sale at any price. They are rarities specially built for various scientific institutes and used to measure time for their respective countries. London has one, as do Zurich and Paris among other locations. The clocks use radio signals to transmit their data to research labs, traffic management services, television and radio stations, as well as to telephone speaking clocks. The caesium clock is also the key to what makes watchmakers IWC tick. At their headquarters in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, they produce a timepiece that is reputed to be the ultimate in mechanical horology. Its name says it all: “Grande Complication” is a wristwatch of the highest complexity and utter exclusivity. Only fifty examples a year leave the manufacturing plant. The Schaffhausen watchmakers spent eight long years developing this combination of a chronograph, a stopwatch, a perpetual calendar with Moon phases, and a repetition – an acoustic time signal that marks off each minute with a softly chirruping “ding-ding-ding-dong” from inside the solid platinum case, produced by tiny hammers hitting circular springs. It is a tour de force of micro-mechanics, a quantum leap of watchmaking that renders the passing of time audible. Its perpetual calendar merits similar praise. It was developed by Kurt Klaus “with nothing more than pencil and paper, logarithmic tables and a pocket calculator”, as he says. Now in his late sixties, this watchmaking genius has reformulated, and answered, certain key questions relevant to his fraternity. One of them is what kind of technology would ensure that a clock gear completes a rotation in a hundred years to an accuracy of within a day? Another asks how a watch mechanism could track the precise duration of a Moon phase so that the two diverge by no more than a few seconds every month.

The IWC watch fully lived up to its name in 1993, when the Swiss added a tourbillon to their “Grande Complication” and launched a limited edition of 125 to mark the company’s 125th anniversary. It was named “Il Destriero Scafusia”, or “The Steed of Schaffhausen”. The rotating mechanism for the anchor and balance spring, weighing a mere 0.3 grams and comprising around one hundred different parts, compensates for the effects of Earth’s gravity on the watch’s accuracy. For Kuet Klaus this watch is proof that even superlatives are surpassable. He is still cogitating about a number of horological secrets which will cause a stir within two or three years. Oh for more time, he sighs, for his head is still brimming with ideas. You can almost see his clockwork mind ticking away. As Stephen Hawking said, time is what you never have enough of. Not even the likes of Kurt Klaus can get around that fact.
From Premium Magazine, 02, 2002 hide this.