Who Came Up with Clockwise and Why?

If you grew up in the world before digital timepieces, you learned about the time-telling "hands " on an analog clock on the wall. The hands (big, little, even second hands) moved "clockwise.” Did you ever wonder why the hands moved in a particular direction?

Go back before clocks, gears, and pendulums, to ancient civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia that tracked time using sundials. All these cultures were in the Northern Hemisphere. That means the sun rose in the east, arched across the southern sky, and set in the west, and that means the shadow cast by a sundial naturally traveled in a loop: west to north to east.

If those ancient civilizations and their sundials had been in the Southern Hemisphere below the equator, the shadow would sweep in the exact opposite direction.

Clocks were invented in Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries, so to make these new machines intuitive, clocks were engineered with mechanical hands that mimicked the familiar, left-to-right sweep of the local sundial shadows.

European clockmaking dominated and became the global standard when clocks were exported to the Southern Hemisphere.

One rare exception to this includes the Old Town Hall in Prague, which runs "backward," mirroring the right-to-left direction of Hebrew script and local vertical sundials. I've seen this beautiful clock in person, and it always gathers a crowd of tourists who marvel at its movements of figures, but most people never notice the conterclockwise of it.

The Cranium Nebula

 

 
NASA’s James Webb Telescope images of the Cranium Nebula 
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

It looks like a brain, complete with what appear to be left and right hemispheres. It is actually a dying star blowing off a shell of gas, and within that shell, a cloud of various gases. The dark lane that divides the sides of the “brain” may be related to an outflow from the central star.

In near-infrared, the nebula’s outer bubble has a white edge and its inner clouds are orange, with a distinct dark lane cutting vertically through the center. Stars and background galaxies appear around the nebula and through the outer bubble.

What’s next for this star will depend on its mass, which is yet undetermined. If it is a high-mass star, it will explode in a supernova. If it’s less massive and more Sun-like, it’ll keep shedding layers until only its core remains as a dense white dwarf star.

Read more about this nebula at science.nasa.gov...

A Phillumenist's Dream

 
Vintage phillumenist collectibles. Source: www.phillumeny.com

Phillumeny is the hobby of collecting items related to matches—most notably matchbox labels, but also matchbooks, matchboxes, and even the tiny printed wrappers from safety matches. Collecting matchbox labels gives us examples of mid-century commercial graphic design.

The free Matchbox Posters Archive via the Internet Archive is a philatelist's dream. This collection houses nearly 6,500 matchbox posters from as early as the 1920’s.  

People who collected matchboxes were once simply called "matchbox collectors." That changed in 1943 thanks to a British collector named Marjorie S. Evans. She wanted a more distinct, sophisticated name for the hobby, similar to philately (stamp collecting) or numismatics (coin collecting). She combined two linguistic roots: phil- (from the Greek philos, meaning "loving" or "fond of") and lumen (from the Latin lumen, meaning "light"). Purists occasionally point out that combining Greek and Latin roots into a single word is a bit of a linguistic "hybrid" faux pas, but the name stuck beautifully.

The origin story behind the name and the hobby combines Greek and Latin roots into a single word, which is a linguistic "hybrid" faux pas.

By 1945, the British Phillumeny Society was formed, cementing the term into the collector's lexicon.

To understand why people started collecting match labels, you have to look at the rise of the match industry in the 19th century. Before safety matches, the mid-1800s saw the rise of friction matches, often called "Lucifers" or "Congreves." Because early matches could be volatile and chemically unstable, packaging them securely in small wooden or cardboard boxes became essential. Because these boxes were cheap to produce and universally used, manufacturers quickly realized that the top label was prime real estate for eye-catching graphic design. 

Matchboxes became miniature canvases featuring exotic typography and branding to stand out in a competitive market. Commemorative events, royal milestones, and military victories, intricate illustrations of animals, historical figures, folklore, and landscapes were all used. 

By the late Victorian era, collecting these vibrant, pocket-sized pieces of commercial art had become an incredibly popular and inexpensive hobby across Europe, India, and Japan. 

Because matchboxes were meant to be discarded after use, surviving vintage labels offer a remarkably well-preserved glimpse into the social history, advertising trends, and graphic design styles of the past two centuries.

via  flickr user Jim Chambers CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Why are they called "lucifers?" It's not Satanic...

Schools and Summer Break

Summer vacation has been an integral part of American family life for more than a hundred years. That is primarily due to one thing: school’s out. 

In my New Jersey childhood, school ended around mid-June, but varied based on how many "snow days" had closed school and extended the year to the required 180 days. I knew that in other parts of the country, school opened in August (not September) and closed in May (not June).

But why is there no school in summer? Most people assume it’s a holdover from a time when the country was more agrarian, and children were required to help out on the family farm. I heard that as a kid. That is a factor, but the summer break or vacation we know today actually had more to do with urban health concerns and public policy than farming. 

This may sound backwards to you, but rural schools in the 1800s did build calendars around farming, but they did it by holding school in winter and summer and taking off spring and fall which are the busiest farm months. 

I didn't learn this until I took a graduate education course. Historian Kenneth Gold explains it in School’s In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools that summer was actually the slowest agricultural season compared to planting and harvest. So if the calendar was designed purely for farm labor, summer would be the worst time to take off.

So why did we ditch spring/fall breaks for summer break?

City schools in the 1800s were overcrowded brick ovens with no AC and bad ventilation. Summer heat combined with large classes (often 50 kids) in one room led to disease outbreaks. Cholera, typhoid, and other illnesses spiked in summer. Health officials literally recommended shutting schools down in July and August.

Most major renovations could only happen with kids out of the way. Summer became the maintenance window by default.

Wealthy urban families fled cities every summer to escape the heat. That left schools half-empty and split along class lines. Reformers like Horace Mann wanted standardized, equal schools for everyone. A common summer break fixed the “rich kids gone, poor kids sweltering” problem.

There was also a weird medical theory amongst 19th-century doctors that genuinely believed too much studying in summer heat caused “brain fever” or mental exhaustion in children. Summer rest was prescribed like medicine.

Horace Mann and the Common School Movement thought rural schedules were too short and inconsistent. Many farm-area schools only ran 60-80 days per year. Reformers wanted longer, standardized school years — closer to 180 days — and they modeled it after urban systems and Prussia’s age-graded schools.

To make age-graded classrooms work across districts, you needed everyone on the same calendar. The farm-driven spring/fall breaks had to go.

Between 1880-1920, states started tying school funding to minimum instructional days. The 180-day calendar won out, running from late summer to late spring. By then, most Americans lived in cities or towns, not on farms. The calendar standardized around urban needs, not agricultural ones.