NEBULA VOLUME 44 Issue 2 PAGE 8
The oldest timepiece seen was some years ago in Salisbury Cathedral, a wrought-iron mechanism, not easily recognized, in the north aisle. This was created for the purpose of pulling and sounding a bell( s) thus identifying the various daily activities for the monks and clergy. It was probably made by specialists on the European continent( France or the Netherlands perhaps) and a similar invention is in Wells and Windsor.
This‘ bell-clock’ may have been connected with Salisbury’ s original magnificent bell tower in the 14 th century but in 1792 the tower was demolished. The‘ bell-clock’ was‘ lost’ until 1926 and was duly restored by the Cathedral authority. Basically a weighted mass creates the gravity to drive the escapement, a truly ingenious piece of technology for its age, which then transfers a horizontal shaft to force a bell rope.
Medieval time measurement in many places, notably Italy and France, had a bell tower and / or a simple dial that only defined hourly changes. I suppose we have to thank ancient Babylonian astronomers / astrologers for the modern hours of a day, who divided the heavenly zodiac into 12 bits. And a remarkable attitude to water in
THE PASSAGE OF TIME by Melvyn Taylor
those long gone times meant that somehow water clocks were constructed.( A fascinating piece of wet-engineering may be seen in St. Mary Redcliffe Church in Bristol. It is called the Chaotic Pendulum and was devised and installed by a learned and very clever team in 1997).
On the passage of time, 1965 was when I joined the LAS at the recommendation of a landsurveyor in the old West Riding County Council’ s architects’ department. In 2009 when we celebrated the 150 th year of its founding a thoughtful soul and friend pointed out the 44 years represented about 30 % of its history. Meetings were held in the Mathematics Dept of the University and the air was distinctly academic: Dr. Robin Jakeways could be consulted on aspects of these meetings but two talks duly stick in my memory. One was about the 98-inch mirror for the Isaac Newton telescope that was being proposed and the speaker showed how tests were to be done. One blow of a timber mallet on it would reveal any fissures that could make it unusable. This action proved correct(!). Then there was a demonstration using radar( in the lecture room) on the detection of meteors- it went over my head even though I had had a
grounding in physics. Often the ongoing work on cosmic-rays done by teams at Haverah Park, outside Harrogate, was up-dated by the Physics Dept.
But returning to time, sundials are very attractive for aesthetics and practical purposes and recently I saw a catalogue of saleable items. It was obvious from images of these that most did not have the appropriate angle of the gnomon even for southern or high northern UK latitudes. And back to Salisbury, the attached photograph taken in 2005 shows an appropriate‘ starry’ feature on this dial located on a wall under the eaves of a house in Fisherton Street.
The Salisbury Medieval Clock