Most remarkable however is the earliest period of 

 this seemingly steady evolution. Side by side uith 

 the advances made in the earliest period extending for 

 less than two centuries from the time of dc Dondi oiu- 

 may sec a spectacular process of degeneration or 

 devolution. Not only is de Dondi's the earliest clock of 

 which we have a full and trustworthy account, it is also 

 far more complicated than any other (see figs. 1, 2) 

 until comparatively modern times ! Moreover, it was 

 not an exceptional freak. There were others like il. 

 and one cannot therefore reject as accidental this 

 process of degeneration that occurs at the very begin- 

 ning of the certain history of the inerhanical clock in 

 Europe. 



On the basis of such evidence 1 ha\e suggested else- 

 where ° that the clock is "nought but a fallen angel 

 from the world of astronomy." The first great clocks 

 of medieval Europe were designed as astronomical 

 showpieces, full of complicated gearing and dials to 

 show the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets, to 

 exhibit eclipses, and to carry ihrou<>h the invoKed 

 computations of the ecclesiastical calendar. As such 

 they were comparable to the orreries of the 18th 

 century and to modern planetariums: that they also 

 showed the time and rang it on bells was almost inci- 

 dental to their main function. One must not neglect, 

 too, that it was in their glorification of the rationality 

 of the cosmos that they had their greatest effect. 

 Through milleniums of civilization, man's under- 

 standing of celestial i)henomena had i)een the very 

 pinnacle of his intellect, and then as now popular 

 exhil)iiion of this sort was just as necessary, as striking, 

 and as impressive. One docs not have to go far to 

 see how the paraphernalia of these early great astro- 

 nomical clocks had great influence on philosophers 

 and theologians and on poets such as Dante. 



It is the thesis of this part of my argument that the 

 ordinary time-telling clock is no affiliate of the other 

 simple time-telling devices such as sundials, sand 

 glasses and the elementary water clocks. Rather it 

 should be considered as a degenerate branch from the 

 main stem of mechanized astronomical devices (I 

 shall call them protoclocks), a stem w'hich can boast a 

 continuous history filling the gap between the a|5- 

 pearance of simple gearing and the complications of 

 de Dondi. VVc shall return to the di.scussion of this 

 main stem after analyzing the very recently discovered 

 parallel stem from medieval China, which reproduced 



the same evohiiion of mechanized astronomical de- 

 vices and incidental time telling. Of the greatest sig- 

 nificance, this stem reveals the crucial independent 

 invention of a mechanical escapement, a feature not 

 found in the European stem in spite of centuries of 

 intensive historical research and effort. 



THE CIIINliSE TR.'\DITIOiV 



For this section I am privilesicd lo draw upon a 

 thrilling research project carried out in 1956 at the 

 L iiixersity of Cambridge by a team con.sisting of Dr. 

 Joseph Needham, Dr. Wang Ling, and myself.'" In 

 the cour.se of this w(jrk we translated and commented 

 on a series of texts most of which had not hitherto been 

 made available in a Western tongue and, though well 

 known in China, had not been recognized as impior- 

 tant for their horological content. The key text with 

 which we started was the "Hsin I Hsiang Fa Yao," or 

 "New Design for a (mechanized) Arniillary (sphere) 

 and (celestial) (ilobe," written by Su Sung in A.D. 

 1090. The very full historical and technical descrip- 

 tion in this text enabled us to establish a glossary and 

 basic understanding of the mechanism that later en- 

 abled us to interpret a whole series of similar, though 

 less extensive texts, giving a history of prior develop- 

 ment cf such devices going back to the introduction of 

 this type of escapement by I-Hsing and Liang Ling- 

 tsan, in A.D. 725, and to what seems to be the orig- 

 inal of all these Chinese astronomical machines, that 

 buili by Chang Heng ca. A. D. 130. Filling the gaps 

 between these landmarks are several other similar 

 texts, giving ample evidence that the Chinese develop- 

 ment is continuous and. at least from Chang Heng 

 onwards, largely inde|3endent of any transmissions 

 frojn the West. 



So far as we can see, the beginning of the chain in 

 C'.hina (as indeed in the West) was the making of 

 simple static models of the celestial sphere. An armil- 

 lary sphere was used to represent the chief imaginary 

 circles {e.g., equator, ecliptic, meridians, etc.), or a 

 .solid celestial globe on which such circles could be 

 drawn, together with the constellations of the fixed 



• Derek J. Price, "Clockwork before the clock," Horological 

 Journal, 1955, vol. 97, p. 810, and 1956, vol. 98, p. 31. 



'"For the use of this material I am indebted to my co-authors. I 

 must also acknowledge thanks to the Cambridge University 

 Press, which in the near future will be publishing our mono- 

 graph, "Heavenly Clockwork." Some of the findings of this 

 paper are included in shorter form as background material for 

 that monograph. A brief account of the discovery of this ma- 

 terial has been published by J. Needham, Wang Ling, and 

 Derek J. Price, "Chinese astronomical clockwork," .\aturt, 

 1956, vol. 177, pp. 600-602. 



86 



BULLETIN 218: CONTRIBUTIONS IROM THE .\iUSEU.\I OF HISTORY .\ND TECHNOLOGY 



