When they made the first clocks, how did they know whether they were accurate?

Question

They had nothing to compare the clocks against, and I don’t think the stars and the sun would have made an useful target for comparison.

In: 17

Answer 1

They didn’t need to be super accurate, because time as we know it wasn’t fixed. The first mechanical clocks were used by monasteries to tell them when to go pray. They were required to say prayers at particular times of day and night. the concept of an hour was not a fixed period of time, but a roughly equal division of the time between dawn and dusk. They didn’t need to count minutes or seconds, they just needed a point on the sundial halfway between dawn and noon. Sundials are fine if there’s sunshine, but if it’s night, or raining, it doesn’t work, which is why the mechanical clocks were invented, and they only needed to be *kinda okay* at dividing up the day and night into four parts.