Inhaltsangabe
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1842 edition. Excerpt: ... duced into apartments, but even then had the mechanicians been told that time-keepers as small as our watches could be made to go with accuracy, they would have regarded the notion as visionary. WATCHES INVENTED. Watch said to have belonged to Henry VIII.--To Anna Boleyn--Watch presented to Charles V.--Ornamental Watches of the 16th Century--Sir William Howard's Watch. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century springs were applied as the maintaining power to time-pieces, thus enabling them to be made small and portable, but these pieces, (now called watches) were imperfect machines, going with even less precision than an old clock; they had only an hour hand, and most of them required winding twice a day. Derham describes a watch said to have belonged to Henry VIII., and states moreover that it required winding but once a week; Anna Boleyn possessed another. These must have dated anterior to 1549; and in a tract printed at Antwerp as early as 1530, Gemma Frisius advises the use of small clocks or watches (then as he says lately invented) for the purpose of discovering the longitude at sea; yet the greater number of foreign writers make it appear that the first watch was presented E in 1550 to the Emperor Charles V. whose taste for the art was adduced by Voltaire as a proof of his insanity. It is astonishing that the philosopher could find nothing in the career of this ambitions man more indicative of the malady, which certainly is not shewn in the following well-known anecdote: While attentively inspecting his time-keepers, they were overthrown by a monk entering abruptly, an accident difficult at that time to be remedied, yet the Emperor merely remarked: " I have been labouring some time without being able to make those clocks go...
Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.
