Compasses are old, but compasses marked in degrees are fairly recent. During the Age of Exploration (when clocks were already commonplace, at least on land), compasses were marked with compass points, like “due south” and “northeast by north”, which don’t have any particular association with widdershins or deosil. Consider Shakespeare, for example: Clocks were so commonplace by his time that he took them for granted and put one in ancient Rome, but Hamlet was mad north-northwest, not 337.5 degrees.
And I don’t buy that it’s directly from motion of the heavens, either. Yes, if you look south, you’ll see heavenly bodies moving in a deosil sense. But the only place you’ll see a complete circle of a path is in the northern sky around the pole star (assuming that you’re observing in the northern hemisphere, of course), and there, the motion around the circles will be widdershins.
I think that the simplest explanation by far is that one type of time-measuring device was designed to be similar, to the extent that it could be, to the previously common type of time measuring devices. And while there are different designs of sundials which would go in different directions, the most common type had the dial horizontal, and the shadow moving in the same direction as the hands on a modern clock.
Hey, Cecil can’t cover everything, can he? He prolly has to leave some scraps for the little doggies now and then, or risk some scene like from one of Romero’s zombie flicks.
Well as Kimstu points out it’s all a matter of your reference point so I can’t entirely accept the books premise without further consideration. I still opt for the left-to-right direction of reading.
“Why do clocks run clockwise? If a clock ran counterclockwise, technically, by definition, it would still be running clockwise. Likewise, no matter how hot or cold a room is, it is still room temperature.” Steven Wright (from the Internet, no verification of authorship)
This “left to right” explanation only applies to the portion of a clock’s face from 9:00 to 3:00. From 3:00 to 9:00 you’re reading right to left. That’s one of the main reason’s to refer to “clockwise” when dealing with circular motion.
mini-hijack: one of the most difficult challenges I ever heard of is the one that has an Earthling, in a radio communication, explaining to an alien civilization the concept of “left and right” in such a way as to guarantee orientation of some piece of apparatus. The deeper one gets into the issue, the more one must accept that such a concept is entirely arbitrary. Either that, or I never heard a convincing reference system explained. end-of-mini-hijack.
Asimov has a collection of his science essays called The Left Hand of the Electron (1972), in which he notes reports of some bias in electron spin, which he speculates might have caused organic molecules to have biased handedness, thus making the twist in DNA go the way it does. If so, left and right aren’t arbitrary. I’m not sure that convinces me, but maybe.[/hijack]
To repeat an earlier inquiry, would any of the early work in Astronomy (specifically the period of say the 12th through 14th centuries) hold any further clues or hints regarding this question?
More specifically, are planetary and stellar motions in the Northern Hemisphere sky principally in the “clockwise” direction or does it depend on time of year, etc?
The nightly motion of celestial bodies, including the moon, the stars and the planets, is from east to west. In the northern hemisphere, that makes things appear to move in a counter-clockwise circle, if they’re close enough to the north celestial pole not to be obscured by the horizon. (Like the Big Dipper constellation, for example. Or better yet the Little Dipper, which is even closer.)
If you subtract away the Earth’s rotation then you can find some bodies — the outer planets in particular — that move in retrograde motion at least some of the time. It is a slow phenomenon however, taking place over days and weeks, and hardly seems like it could be the inspiration for picking a clock’s direction of motion.
SUNDIALS! What better way if you are designing a clock to have the hands move in the same direction the shadow on a sundial does in the Northern Hemisphere? People were already used to measuring time with sundials.
Yes, I agree. But I was addressing the other poster’s question about whether the choice of clock motion could have come from the motion of celestial bodies in the night sky.
… Great theory - except that in the northern hemisphere the shadow moves counterclockwise, of course, from the left side to the lower side to the
right side. The sun moves clockwise. Maybe clocks were invented in the
southern hemisphere?
Clearly, this would be heresy would it not, since it does not fit into the Eurocentric theory of the universe.
Ever see a sundial in the Northern hemisphere? If you look down at the sundial, the shadow of the sun on it moves clockwise. At the equinoxes, the sun will cast a shadow pointing in the direction of 3 o’clock. At noon it casts a shadow at the 6 o’clock position. At sunset the shadow of the sun is roughly at the 9 o’clock position.
rfgdxm - no I haven’t had a chance to see a sundial in the Northern Hemisphere. But the following link goes into an explanation of how the location of a sundial in the Northern Hemisphere effects its use and results, in addition to tying together many of the topics previously discussed such as widdershins:
This reference provides further discussion refuting some claims that Jewish time is kept counterclockwise though the clock on the outside of the Prague Jewish community center does rotate counterclockwise: