The fire watch
06.29.09
In addition to sun and water, since the beginning of the XIII century and the first fire there, or candle, a clock. This is a thin candle with a length of meter installed on the entire length of the scale. They are relatively accurate with time, but at night still covered the home and church and secular dignitaries, including governors, which were in the middle of XIII century, St. Louis, and in the XIV century – Karl V. To the sides of the candles are sometimes hung on metal pins, which, as of burning and melting wax fell, and their impact on the metal cup candelabras was sort of audible alarm time.
During the entire century as oil and serve people, not only for food but also as an illuminating material, and as a basis for oil lampadnyh hours. Typically, there are simple lamps with an open burner and wick with a glass bulb for the oil, fitted with time scale. The volume of the bulb chosen so that its contents had to continuous light between 6 pm and 8 am. Thickness and length of the burning wick of flame and regulate the amount of oil so as to decrease the level of oil in the flask corresponded to put on a marked time. The initial cylindrical or slightly convex glass vessel, under the oil was a source of error in measuring time. The thing is that evening due to a higher level of oil pressure causes a rapid burn, the closer to the morning. Therefore lampadnye hours later origin had a glass flask in the form of an extended upward pears, so that there is at least partially equalize the rate of combustion of oil and ensure accuracy of the time.
Determine the time of occurrence of these hours is difficult, but you can say for sure what happened is not before learned to produce sufficient quantities of glass. Lampadnyh most hours were in China, which is generally regarded as the cradle of all types of firing hours. In addition to all kinds lampadnyh hours, then later appeared gazosvetnye clock, which the Chinese love so much that some types persisted until the XX century. So far in China report that about 3000 years ago, FO-hee, the father of China, and its first emperor, established the first fire watches that they measured the day and at night.
There was another type of firing hours, the so-called wick. Their home was part of the wick in the form of a long metal rod, covered with a layer of tar from wood filings. Fire smoldering sawdust, podozhzhennyh sticks at one end, gradually perezhigal thin, transversely strained fibers from suspended to balls that fell in a metal cup. Occasionally turn the wick in the spiral form in itself replace hourly scale.
The most typical for China wick watches took the form of a dragon, in the ridge which strengthens a special holder for the sticks. The speed of the combustion wick to depend on many factors, and to determine its required a lot of experience. On the accuracy of these watches far less solar or water clock.