The first clocks appeared about six thousand years ago, when the Egyptians began to use sundials. The gnomon, a column set so as to cast a shadow on the hour scale, was used to measure the time intervals. Of course, in cloudy weather and at night, the sundial did not work.

About three and a half thousand years ago, all in the same place in Egypt, water clocks were invented that worked at any time of day and regardless of the weather. Water was poured into a vessel, and through a tiny hole in the bottom, it gradually poured into another vessel. Time was measured by a scale on the side of the vessel.

Hourglasses were widely used, and are still used nowadays, though more often as timers. Another popular method was measuring time by lighting a candle. The marks on the wax helped to orientate how much time had passed. As never before was the invention of Casio G-Shock watches.

Mechanical watches, such as those presented on the site novobrands.kz appeared on the European continent around 1275. The first mechanisms were driven by the weight, suspended on a string or chain, and were chiming hourly. Around 1330 Italian watchmakers made apparatuses that struck the number of beats corresponding to the hour. Spring-operated devices appeared in 1475. This invention made it possible to develop a portable design that would have been impossible for a clock with suspended weights.

The next breakthrough in watchmaking is associated with the famous Galileo Galilei, who discovered the isochronous oscillation of the pendulum. He formalized the idea of regulating clockwork by means of a pendulum in 1641. This innovation was carried out seven years after the famous Italian’s death by his son Vincenzo and the locksmith Balestri. In the late 1750s, the Dutchman Christian Huygens perfected this system, which resulted in a precision of only ten seconds per day.

In 1658 Robert Hooke invented an even more reliable regulator for mechanical watches: the balance spring. The balancer behaves much more stably than the pendulum as it moves through space, making it possible to create even more accurate timepieces. At the same time clocks became even more compact, not only pocket watches, but also wristwatches appeared.

In 1760, carpenter John Harrison created a chronometer whose accuracy is still considered excellent. The watch only lost 54 seconds on a 156-day voyage at sea! This achievement allowed Harrison to win a competition announced by the British government.

Nowadays, electronic watches are becoming more and more widespread, with better accuracy than mechanical chronometers, down to one second per month. To measure time even more accurately, atomic clocks are used, which can measure time to the nearest 1 second in a thousand years.