The back-and-forth movement of the bar (moved by the large falling weights) would alternately engage and disengage the cogs on the clock’s machinery. These interrupted movements eventually measured off the minutes and, later, the seconds. When, in due course, clocks became common, people would think of time no longer as a flowing stream but as the accumulation of discrete measured moments. The sovereign time that governed daily lives would no longer be the sunlight’s smooth-flowing elastic cycles. Mechanized time would no longer flow. The tick-tock of the clock’s escapement would become the
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