Notaries public were first appointed by the Fathers of the Christian Church to make a collection of the acts or memoirs of martyrs in the first century.
The administration of the oath in civil cases is of high antiquity. See Exodus xxii. 11. Swearing on the Gospels was first used in 528. The oath was first administered in judicial proceedings in England by the Saxons, in 600. The words “So help me God, and all saints,” concluded an oath, till 1550.
Signals to be used at sea were first contrived by James II., when he was Duke of York, in 1665. They were afterwards improved by the French commander Tourville, and by Admiral Balchen.
Raw silk is said to have first been made by a people of China called Ceres, 150 B. C. It was first brought from India, in 274, and a pound of it at that time was worth a pound of gold. The manufacture of raw silk was introduced into Europe from India by some monks in 550. Silk dresses were first worn in 1455. The eggs of the silk-worm were first brought into Europe in 527.
Paulus Jovius was the first person who introduced mottoes; Dorat, the first who brought anagrams into fashion. Rabelais was the first who wrote satires in French prose; Etienne Jodelle, the first who introduced tragedies into France. The Cardinal of Ferrara, Archbishop of Lyons, was the first who had a tragicomedy performed on the stage of Italian comedians. The first sonnet that appeared in French is attributed to Jodelle.
Guido Aretino, a Benedictine monk of Arezzo, Tuscany, in 1204 designated the notes used in the musical scale by syllables derived from the following verses of a Latin hymn dedicated to St. John:—
| UT queant | laxis REsonare fibris, |
| MIra gestorum | FAmuli tuorum, |
| SOLve pollutis | LAbii reatum. |
| O Pater Alme. | |
By this means he converted the old tetrachord into hexachords. He also invented lines and spaces in musical notation.
The invention of clocks is by some ascribed to Pacificus, Archdeacon of Verona, in the ninth century; and by others, to Boethius, in the early part of the sixth. The Saracens are supposed to have had clocks which were moved by weights, as early as the eleventh century; and, as the term is applied by Dante to a machine which struck the hours, clocks must have been known in Italy about the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century. The most ancient clock of which we have any certain account was erected in a tower of the palace of Charles V., King of France, in 1364, by Henry de Wyck or de Vick, a German artist. A clock was erected at Strasbourg in 1370, at Courtray about the same period, and at Speyer in 1395.
Watches are said to have been made at Nuremberg as early as 1477; but it is uncertain how far the watches then constructed resembled those now in use. Some of the early ones were very small, in the shape of a pear, and sometimes fitted into the top of a walking-stick. As time-keepers, watches could have had very little value before the application of the spiral spring as a regulator to the balance. This was invented by Hooke, in 1658.