Josh Clark

It's still standing, but when it was in use, it had water clocks, it had sundials.

You could gauge the wind.

You could tell what was going on celestially.

He just basically packed every neato timekeeping invention that was around at the time into this thing.

Yeah, and like you said, a lot of people just started getting just sort of fancy with it and actually just really creative.

In 8th century CE, there was a Chinese Buddhist monk

who, along with his colleagues, created a clock that was a water powered wheel, had a gear system.

This is when gears really started becoming a huge thing in timekeeping.

Yeah.

And it did a single rotation every 24 hours, which you think like, all right, that just sounds sort of regular.

But it also had like bells chiming on the hour and it had a drumbeat that chimed every quarter hour.

So this is when like kind of hearing chimes and things to tell you what time it was came in.

It went every 15 minutes.

That's right.

There's a guy named Su Song who is very famous for his 35-foot, I also saw it described as 40-foot clock tower.

One of the things it did were there were mannequins that came out and rang gongs.

Yeah.

Like you usually associate this with like maybe some sort of cuckoo clock or something like that.

This is from the 11th century.

So it's pretty impressive that he came up with this.