May 10 in Japan "Clock Day"

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Every year on June 10, a watch presentation and exhibition is held in Japan. On June 10, customers flock to watch shops, as the country celebrates the traditional "Day of the Hour" at dawn. Every year on June 10, there are huge exhibitions and presentations of watches in Japan. Visitors can watch and even buy watches of all shapes and sizes - large and small, electronic, mechanical, sand, different shapes and appearances. There is another tradition associated with this ceremony: on this day in Japan it was customary to give the first hour to children. The date of the holiday was not chosen by chance - according to legend, on the same day in 671, the clock first appeared in the palace of the Japanese emperor. It is understandable that this is not the first hour in the world. The Babylonians, who invented the Sundial 3,5 years ago, began counting time. On the dial - the characters are carved on a flat stone, - fastened to a stick (gnomon), the shadow of which served as a clockwise. At night, the time was determined by the water clock, which the Greeks called klepsidra. These units were drawn water containers from which water dripped. Determined the time on the scale. In Europe and China, there was a "fiery" clock, more precisely, the time was known by the inscriptions on it as the wax melted. Hourglasses appeared a thousand years ago. But over time, as a result of the development of glass-blowing skills, they became more precise, so that these clocks could measure a small time interval of half an hour. Medieval minaret clocks used to announce prayer times in churches at first. With a heavy steel digital and a few gear extension wheels, the dial of this very large watch was neither a clock nor a mile, and the time was announced by a bell. Mechanical watches without pendulums were created in the second half of the XIII century, but who created them, when and where - is unclear. In the second half of the XNUMXth century, after the invention of the flat spring instead of the hanging stone watch, Peter Henlein of Nuremberg made a watch that could be carried with him. Its shell was in the form of an egg made of brass soaked in gold. The first "Nuremberg egg" was 100-125 mm in diameter and 75 mm thick and was carried around the neck or by hand. The watch, which is close to modern, was invented in 1657 by the Dutch Christian Huygens. Attempts were made to establish the Russian watch industry in the time of Catherine II, but mechanical watches arrived in Russia in the XNUMXth century, with letters instead of numbers on their dials. St. Petersburg and Moscow watch factories made pocket and bongle wall hanging watches. But these watches were mostly given only to those in the palace. By the end of the XNUMXth century, mass production of watches began. The first watch was a women's model. These watches, made of precious stones, looked like jewelry. Men fastened their watches with chains to the pockets of their vests, but in the 90s, Russian army officers began to carry ring timepieces that could be threaded through a ring. .