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When the Archduke Azzo Visconti died on August 14, 1339, his death was recorded as occurring at the twentieth hour. In the whole of human history, he was the first person given a time of death with a modern hour. Before this point in history, accurate hours were reserved for the pedantic study of astronomers and mathematicians, but on the peninsula of Italy, time was just beginning to be codified across society.
While water clocks—known as clepsydra—had existed in the Western world for millennia, the usefulness of clocks, time, and schedules was something that would take civilizations a much longer time to make use of. Just as the lightbulb opened up a whole new world of possibilities for humankind to be industrious indoors and even at night, timekeeping was just about to revolutionize human productivity.
Allegory of Good Government
The need for accurate timekeeping became a governance issue in places like London when Council meetings weren’t allowed to be held until the murkily designated time of “after mass.” The church, however, had little interest in keeping its services to a schedule. By setting meeting times to a more rigid “8 o’clock” schedules across the continent were able to be reigned in. While bells could help keep time for anybody within earshot of a city, relatively cheap and easy to produce hourglasses made it possible not just to keep time, but to coordinate events across countries and even oceans.
By using multiple hourglasses, churches, courts, and governing bodies were able to allocate short amounts of time to different items on their agendas. The hourglass set in the Ripley collection was acquired in 1925 by Robert Ripley himself on a trip to Italy.
The design of this timekeeper allows one to track the quarter, half, three-quarter, and full hour. Designs like this date back to the 17th-century, and would have probably been owned by a church.
No one is exactly sure who invented the hourglass, or how it came to such widespread popularity, but the device soon became invaluable. Ships could use them to navigate—the flow of their sand was less affected by waves than water clocks—and time was able to be standardized across the world.
Today, timekeeping is kept more precisely with universal constants and the ubiquity of technology, but low-tech hourglasses remain popular as timers for everything from home cooks poaching eggs to children brushing their teeth.
Uncertain Origins
Before it became the symbol of a program stalling on your PC, the hourglass spent centuries as the representation of mortality and an emblem of the sciences. Much more than a symbol, of course, it also kept track of time in the pre-Swatch Era. While the hourglass seems like the kind of primitive tool used by the ancients, its origins are surprisingly somewhat recent — unless its true history has been obscured by the very sands of time.
It has long been thought that hourglasses were certainly an ancient device, thanks especially to an ancient Roman bas-relief that seemed to include one. Recently, however, it was determined that the part of the bas-relief with the hourglass on it was only added in the 16th century, after the invention of the mechanical clock.
In fact, the first authentic evidence of hourglasses did not appear until 1338 AD, when Ambrosio Lorenzetti painted a fresco with the personification of Temperance holding an hourglass. Later that century, hourglasses were mentioned in written documents, including a 1345 sales receipt for items bought by the clerk of an English ship, and the inventory taken at the 1380 death of King Charles V of France. So from these three examples, it is clear that by the early 14th century, hourglasses were in common usage by everyone from sailors to kings, and had already taken on symbolic values as a device of measurement.
It makes sense that a ship clerk would have purchased an hourglass, since it is a strong possibility that hourglasses were first developed for maritime use. Before the 14th century, time was measured in unequal hours, based on the durations of day and night on each date. On a ship, however, the measurement of equal hours would have been necessary for calculating the distance traveled (since distance = rate x time). Sand-filled hourglasses would have been preferable to water clocks because, if suspended, they would be relatively unaffected by the motion of the ocean.
So basically all the evidence points to the hourglass being invented around 1000-1100 AD, during that era’s great advances in maritime navigation. This dating gives the hourglass roughly enough time to become widely used and to enter the material record around 1300.
Not everyone, however, is convinced.
It does, after all, seem bizarre that the hourglass would have been invented around the same time as the mechanical clock and the magnetic compass, two examples of advanced technological prowess compared to the decidedly analog hourglass. The sandglass’s similarity to different types of water clock also raises some questions. The water clock was in common usage throughout Egypt, Greece, and China as early as 1500 BC. It’s easy to imagine that the brilliant engineers of those great ancient cultures would have thought to use sand (which is, in some places, a much more abundant resource) instead of water. (Though the best hourglasses were not filled with regular sand, which is coarse and susceptible to humidity; common materials, at least during the Renaissance, were marble dust, pulverized tin or lead, or crushed eggshells.)
The other compelling argument in favor of an earlier origin for hourglasses is the fact that they were so prevalent a symbol in the visual arts starting in the 1300s AD. A symbol of Vanitas, or the futility and transience of earthly pursuits, hourglasses are visible in many Renaissance paintings as a emblem of human mortality. Death and Time were often depicted as old men carrying a scythe and an hourglass, a stark reminder of man’s inexorable march toward the grave. Because of these morbid associations, the hourglass was also a symbol commonly used on pirate flags, a warning message to enemy ships about what awaited them if they chose to attack. Of course, it was still primarily a measure of time, and so also symbolized empiricism, popping up in images of astronomers and engineers as emblems of mathematical truth. So the question remains, could this object have permeated trans-European culture so thoroughly in only a few short centuries?
Of course, we may never know, unless genuine evidence older than 1338 turns up somewhere. In the meantime, the hourglass is still favored as a desktop accessory, whether for its associations with Renaissance culture, pirate culture, or with the inexorable passage of time.
