The need to understand the passage of time has been fundamental to civilizations. Apart from the basic need to predict when crops should be sown timekeeping soon became tied up with religious events and later with regulation of daily life. This course will give a background to the development of how the strive for measurement of time was achieved through technical advances and the effect of art and design on clock cases that would ensure that time keepers achieved an important position in the domestic home and an increasingly complex commercial world. More recently, it has allowed us to ask what time actually is.
Course aim
To introduce the study and practice of timekeeping and clocks from earliest times to the 20th Century giving students a detailed background of the history of their mechanical and artistic development.
Do I need any particular skills or experience?
- This course is for beginners and improvers
By the end of the course I should be able to:
- Have a basic understanding of the what is a timekeeper and how time was kept before the introduction of mechanical clocks.
- Have an understanding of mechanical development of clocks and watches
- Have an understanding of relevance of the need to develop timekeeping in our society
- Understand the major influences behind mainstream clock case styles.
- Understand the basic process of conducting an investigation and producing a small report (this assumes that the project is undertaken). What teaching methods will be used and will there be work outside of the
What else do I need to know?
A basic understanding of history might be useful to help with the background.
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