The Illustrated History of Clocks and Watches Book

How many times a day do we glance at our wristwatches, or the clock on the office wall? Hundreds of times, probably, but such is the ubiquity of time-keeping instruments in our world that we rarely think about the thousands of years of artistry and effort required to make clocks and watches what they are today--affordable, accurate and all-pervasive.In the 288-page The History of Clocks & Watches, Eric Bruton--a clock-maker himself, and a frequent presenter on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow--chronicles the long development of the timepiece from the shadow clocks of the ancient Egyptians through the intricate mechanical clocks of the Renaissance to contemporary atomic clocks. Bruton's highly readable text is accompanied by hundreds of illustrations, many full colour and full page, plus a number of helpful line drawings showing different types of clock mechanisms and components. One significant flaw is that the book, a reprint of the 1979 edition, has not been updated to take time-keeping advances after that date into account.The History of Clocks & Watches goes beyond the instruments themselves in its penultimate chapter, "The Science of Time", which describes how the practice of time keeping has impacted on physics and cosmology, while the book's final chapter surveys famous clocks around the world, from Big Ben to the astronomical clocks of Rouen.While only hard-core horologists are likely to consider The History of Clocks & Watches an essential addition to their reference shelves, readers with an interest in history, science or the history of science--especially those whose chronological curiosity was aroused by Dava Sobel's Longitude and the television series it inspired--will find much to interest and admire in this handsome volume. --CA WillsRead More