Josh Clark

Oh, okay.

Because he would become pope later on.

He developed, I guess in his pre-pope days, a mechanical timekeeping device called

Like truly mechanical and 996 CE.

But then it took a few hundred years for it to become like for mechanical clocks to become a real thing.

It didn't really catch on.

Right.

Which makes some people suspect that that he might not have actually done that.

So what's happened here, I guess, we've transitioned from tracking the movement of water to track time to actually using the kinetic energy in water that's, say, flowing downhill to run gears and stuff like that.

Those are the mechanical time devices that we're using.

That were some of the original mechanical ones.

Like the Chinese came up with this a very long time ago.

When Europe got involved, they removed water to run gears and replaced them with weights.

But it's the same principle at work.

Like if you hold a weight up on a rope and let it fall down, gravity is going to pull it toward the earth.

And it's releasing kinetic energy.

If you can control its descent, you can use that to turn gears and to keep track of time in a very specific way.

I mean, it's not nearly as accurate as anything we track time with today, but it was still pretty impressive that they were making these in like the 13th century.

Yeah, for sure.

There was a monk in 1271 named Robertus Anglicus.