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Man must have become aware at a very early stage in his history that his shadow accompanied him wherever he went in the sunshine, and that it changed its length as the sun went down. At some significant moment a man thought to measure the length of his shadow. He did this by placing a stone on the ground and moving towards the sun until the tip of his shadow fell upon the stone. Then he placed the heel of one foot to the toes of the other and measured the number of feet to the length of his shadow, by counting them on his fingers.

One of the earliest personal timekeepers was what the Egyptians called a merkhet and the Greeks a horologus. Its main purpose was as a plumb-line holder, but it could also check the transit of selected stars across the meridian to calculate the hour of the night because the position of a clock star' in the sky at night will provide the time like the position of the sun in the day.

The most common personal sundial was a cylinder with different hour scales around it signifying different months. It was hung from a thread and a horizontal pin was inserted at the top of the appropriate month scale. The tip of the shadow down the cylinder gave the time. The Roman carried such sundials and the Saxons apparently developed a similar system or copied the idea.

A favorite form of compass dial in seventeenth century Europe was a tablet folding in two, book wise. The tablets were made in silver, ivory, boxwood or brass. When the halves were opened, a string stretched across them. The shadow of the thread showed the hour when the dial was placed on a north-south line indicated by a small compass needle in the base.

The first portable mechanical timekeeper was made possible by the invention of spring propulsion. It then became simply a matter of mechanical ingenuity to reduce the size sufficiently for the timepiece to be carried on the person, to become what we know it as today, the pocket watch. The solution was found in one of those simple ideas that, once thought of, seem so obvious. The early clock frame has a plate top and bottom, kept apart by corner posts. The pivots of the wheels run in vertical pillars. Someone thought of turning the wheels sideways so that their pivots ran in the plates. The layout was simpler and more logical, but required more precision in manufacture. The first know illustration of this layout appears in a Burgundian or Flemish manuscript written between approximately 1460 and 1480.

Clocks with plated movements were first

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