Why is telling time so important

This beautiful ebony and silver wall clock Ahasuerus Fromanteel Mounted Wall Clock,c is one of a very small number of London-made clocks constructed in veneered box cases.

Like our planet, the analogue clock is round and has its own life cycle, that which is based upon a hour day. The importance of being able to read these clocks is significant; not only does it enable a person to tell the time, but also establishes boundaries and the time frames upon which our world has been built on since the seventeenth century, when pendulum clocks were first introduced, c. The water clock made it possible to measure time in a simple and reasonably reliable way. The better measurement of time has been a human fascination for centuries but in the 18th century the clock emerged as a scientific instrument in its own right, notwithstanding its conventional role to mark the passing of the hours.

The pendulum clock owes is refinement to Galileo noticing the regularity of a suspended lamp swinging back and forth in the cathedral of Pisa, when he was still a student there. The high water mark of an instrument of measuring time that was both perfectly fit for purpose and elegant was the marine chronometer invented by John Harrison in England.

It was a response to the need to measure time on board ship to a high level of precision, and so to be able to determine longitude the pendulum clock was unsuitable for marine use due to the motion of the ship. His clock enabled the measurement of time, and so a position at sea, to high accuracy.

It gave the Royal Navy an unprecedented tool for navigation. The work of 20th-century watch and clock makers continued that tradition — the skill of George Daniels in Britain in creating some of the best and most beautiful timepieces using traditional and hand-crafted methods can be seen in the permanent exhibition now at the Science Museum in London.

Any Gender Men's Women's. Shop by Power. Best-Selling Reading Glasses. The Sophie. The Beatrix. The Lorelai Bifocal. The Brit. The Festive. Eating, sleeping and playing — there is a time for everything we do.

Telling the time might seem like second nature to most of us now, but we all had to learn at some point. As children develop they begin to gain a more profound understanding of the workings of time, and the way in which it affects our everyday lives.

Helping your child learn to tell the time is not exclusively bound to teaching them to read a clock, as how can they be expected to read the time if they do not have basic knowledge of what time actually is? Just as you would not expect a child to start reading before they could talk, telling the time is a developmental process which occurs in stages. From an early age, children are cultivating an awareness of things which have happened, things that are occurring at the moment and things which are to come.

In order to construct an idea of time, a child must make the all important link between the events in their life and when these events take place.

By learning about past, present and future, children can begin to place logical order into their lives and so make sense of the things happening around them.