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| Clock of Strasbourg Cathedral |
One
of the most surprising instruments used to measure time is the clock of Strasbourg
Cathedral, which contains a mechanical
computer, a marvel made up of gears and cogwheels, a pinnacle of
the instrumentation of that time, which could be considered comparable to
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, except that it is not a programmable
computing device, but a computing machine built for the specific purpose of
calculating time. More details can be found in this
article in the journal The Sciences
of the New York Academy of Sciences.
The
clock is inside the building, rather than at a tower, like those of many other
cathedrals. It has a long history, as it dates back since the 14th century,
although it was completely rebuilt in the 16th. By the end of the 18th century
it stopped working. Legend says that, at the beginning of the 19th century, an
orderly who was showing the cathedral to a group of visitors mentioned that the
clock had not been working for a long time. Then a boy who was part of the group
exclaimed: I will fix it! Forty years
later, he did. That child would have been Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué, who
remodeled the clock around 1840.
