People started carrying time-keeping machines around with them all day, just as we do with our smartphones. With further engineering breakthroughs, clock mechanisms continued to shrink, leading to the creation of the pocket watch. ![]() As inventors discovered ways to build smaller, less expensive clocks, the devices moved into people’s homes in the form of wall clocks and floor clocks - the equivalent of the bulky desktop PC that in the 1980s became a fixture of the modern home. Society became more productive and predictable as well as more regimented. Hours, minutes, and seconds ticked away with industrial exactitude, and people quickly adapted themselves to the new, martial rhythm. Time, which had previously been experienced as a natural, cyclical flow, began to be experienced as a succession of discrete, precisely measurable units. Installed in cathedrals and town halls, they were the mainframes of their time, and they had a profound effect on the way people lived. Mechanical clocks started out as large, institutional machines. Both are stories, at a technical level, of miniaturization and personalization, and both reveal how changes in the design of a common technology can alter not only its function but also the way it influences personal behavior and social norms. The early history of time-keeping machines bears a striking resemblance to the recent evolution of digital computers. ![]() ![]() ![]() For a precedent, we need only look back to the development of the last great arm-mounted technology: the wristwatch.
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