Humans have always needed a way to tell time… long before numbers, watches, or alarms were even a thought. The very first “clocks” were shadows. Ancient Egyptians used tall stone pillars called obelisks to track how the sun moved across the sky, letting them guess the hour by the angle of the shadow. Later came sundials, water clocks, burning candles, and even bowls that dripped water at a steady rate. Time wasn’t exact... it was a best guess.
Everything changed in the 1300s when European inventors created the first mechanical clocks. These early machines used gears, weights, and swinging balances to keep time more accurately, but they were huge and lived in town squares, not homes. By the 1600s, the pendulum clock arrived, and suddenly time was precise down to the minute. Then in the 1800s, pocket watches and wind-up clocks made personal timekeeping normal.
The 1900s introduced electric clocks, wristwatches, and the digital displays we know today. Now we’ve got phones and satellites syncing time worldwide down to the millisecond. From shadows in the dirt to glowing numbers on a screen, clocks are how we learned to structure our days, schedule our lives, and keep the whole world running on rhythm.
#TheStoryBehindIt #Clocks #EverydayHistory #LearnSomethingNew #HistoryMadeSimple
