"That seems funny, doesn't it?" Christopher suggested.
"Yes, until you see how naturally it grew out of an advancing civilization. After this slow-moving, sleepy interval of idleness and ignorance, when there were no books, no schools, no learning of any kind, there came a great waking up, or Renaissance, which stirred the populace in every direction. Printing was invented, books written, and people, hearing of other lands, began to travel. In consequence life became busier and time more valuable. Moreover, with the spread of Christianity, monasteries and convents were everywhere erected, and attached to these religious orders were specified intervals for work, prayer and various masses and services. Such periods were marked off by the ringing of bells. Thus it happened quite consistently that the first clocks introduced were in religious buildings and on the spires of churches and were without faces or hands, merely indicating by the stroke of one or more bells the termination of the hour."
"But I should not call that a clock at all," Christopher objected.
"Oh, it was a clock. Such a contrivance could not perform its function without works. The bell or bells rung as a result of turning wheels. Moreover, the very word 'clock' is derived from a root which in almost every language means 'bell.' The French was cloche, the Saxon clugga. Thus it came about that later on the works of more modern clocks frequently had two distinct mechanisms: the bell portion that chimed or struck the hour, and the section that included the moving of the hands. Years afterward we find this distinction still maintained, and discover old clockmakers speaking of a clock that did not strike merely as a timekeeper."
"How curious!" murmured Christopher. "And who was it that evolved this machine that would strike the hours?"
"That, I suppose, we shall never positively know; but in all probability it was a monk, who, having considerable leisure at his command and perhaps being held responsible for the ringing of the monastery bell once in so often, bethought himself of a scheme whereby the bell could be made to ring without him. History tells us that William, Abbott of Hirschau, who died toward the end of the eleventh century, invented a horologium modeled after the celestial hemisphere; therefore he may have been the inventor of the clock, for soon after his death these striking bells begin to make their appearance on church towers and in other religious buildings.
"A couple of centuries later we read of clocks being sent as presents. Sultan Saladin sent to Emperor Frederick II a very ambitious article which by means of weights and wheels not only indicated the hours but the course of the sun, moon, and planets. Now who invented such an affair as that we do not know. It must, however, have been some ingenious Saracen who certainly could have heard nothing about the Abbott of Hirschau and his striking bells. Indeed, when one considers the superstition of the age, we cannot but grant it was almost fortunate a clock such as ours was not then invented, for people were great believers in witchcraft and were liable to attribute to evil spirits anything they did not understand, and forthwith destroy it."
"How ridiculous!" scoffed Christopher.
"They were children, remember—intellectual children—ignorant as babies because, poor souls, they had had neither books nor teaching. Savages are, you know, terrified at a thing they cannot fathom and these persons were as yet little more. Well, at any rate, clocks began to make their appearance. By 1286 one of these faceless mechanisms was put up on St. Paul's Cathedral in London; and before 1300, others were, by order of the clergy, installed at Canterbury and Westminster."
"And these just chimed or struck?"