Can You Appreciate The Ingenuity Of Creating A Sundial?
When I started studying up on real ancient clocks, I was at first a little bit disappointed. I found out that the first clock was probably the sundial, a design which seemed sort of obvious and inelegant to me. It was years before I could appreciate the ingenuity of creating a sundial. Before the sundial, no one had probably thought about measuring the passage of the sun in the sky. It was something you could estimate by eye, but it was not related to any units of time. Once it was actually being measured with a stake and lines, however, people could start thinking about time as something that can be quantified and divided. It was the start of a whole new paradigm.