Page:How and Why Library 404.jpg



It’s great fun to hold a watch up to a baby’s pink ear. He is so as-ton-ished by the busy tick-tick-ticking. One little girl remembers thinking a Brownie did the ticking, and that the mouse that ran up the clock did the striking. When the little gold back doors were snapped open, she fully expected to see a live playmate pop out. Before any child can talk plain he wants to  know what makes the wheels go 'round.

Once there were only clocks, and clocks without ticks, at that. A clock without a tick seems as odd as the smile without a cat in Alice in Wonderland. In pictures, Old Father Time carries an hour- glass clock. In an hour-glass it takes just one hour for the sand to run through a little hole from one hollow glass cone to another. It is wound up by turning it over at the end of every hour. Really, Father Time ought to carry the sun, or a bunch of fire-cracker stars. They are the oldest and best timekeepers.

If you were to stand still, all day, in a  sunny field, I and watch your shadow grow shorter, up to noon, then jump around to the other side and grow longer until sunset, you might think of making a shadow clock, or sun-dial. A sunbeam, shining through a hole in a roof, makes a moving golden spot on the floor below. If you ever go across the ocean to the old world, you may see stone sun-dials in castle gardens, and clock-faces in the marble floors of great churches. Shadows and sunbeams were the first hour hands.

In old, old times people didn’t have to catch trains, nor little children go to school, so minutes were not very important. But they did want to measure the exact length of eclipses of the sun and moon. A little over three hundred years ago, a great astronomer named Galileo was in a church, when some one bumped into a hanging bronze lamp and set it swinging. Back and forth it went, back and forth, as regularly as—guess! The pendulum of a grandfather's clock. When it slowed down and stopped—when "the old cat died," as you say when you stop swinging, he started it again with a push.