The Types Of Clocks You Should Be Aware Of

A clock is a type of clock that is used to verify, measure, indicate, and keep time. It is one of the most useful and oldest inventions made by humans till date. Based on its functionality and use, it meets the requirements to track the time intervals shorter in comparison with natural units such as a day, lunar month, or year. For years, people have been using devices operating on many physical processes.

Some time measuring devices predecessors to modern clocks are taken as clocks that depend on natural movements. For instance, a sundial indicates the time with the exposure of a shadow position on a flat surface. Some other clocks are known as water clocks, analogue clocks, digital clocks, and hourglasses. Here are the types of clocks you should know:

Analog Clocks

Analog clocks are most often using the famous clock face - moving hands of hour and minute handles over the arrangement of fixed numbered dials that are placed during a circle that signifies 12 hours of 1 day. Shorter hour hands can make exactly 2 revolutions in at some point , and longer minute hand makes one revolution every hour. Sometimes (but not always) the long but very thin “seconds” hand makes one revolution per minute. Throughout our history, clocks briefly used different configurations – 10 hour clock during French Revolution and 18th century Italian 6 hour clock. Both designs were abandoned in favor of standardized 24 hour analog dial.

Sundials can also be considered as analogue clocks. With over 5 thousand years long tradition of using sundials (3500 BC – 1850s AD), this type of clock represents the longest enduring clock design of our history. By following sun’s shadow that's recorded by sundial’s gnomon, but many problems of this clock use are one of the foremost reasons they are not used today (inability to be absolutely accurate, manual calculation of daylight-savings time time, seasonal changes, inability to work during night and cloudy weather).

Digital clocks

Rise of the digital era enabled us to understand access to very precise and reliable electronic clocks that display time with numeric displays. The two commonest display formats are 24-hour notation (from 00-23) and in 12-hour notation where clocks must also show an AM/PM indicator. With each passing year, digital clocks gain over slowly disappearing analogue clocks. Display surface of this clock doesn't need to be inside small LCD, LED or VFD screens, but they're going to even be projected on either very large public surfaces or indoors for persons with imperfect vision.

Electronic Word clocks

Word clocks aren't using a numeric display, but instead they're writing natural sentences on the screen that tells us time. Sentences are often recorded either via software or with hardware.

Auditory clocks

Clocks that used recording of human voice or computer generated voice to tell time. Alternatively, voice time is often presented as auditory codes. This type of clock is typically used for announcing time in large areas (church bells that rang a specific number of times at the start of each hour), telephony or for blind people.

Tactile clocks

A tactile clock is a valuable time indicating machine for the people who can’t see. It produces physical representation of numbers in the blind text code or standard numbers on its surface. 

Multi Display Clocks

Such a type of a clock is either digital or analogue. Its primary attribute is its ability to display time as per different time zones with the support of its own multiple faces or the use of many time standards.