this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Was this the impetus for the town clock?
Clock towers are way older than the industrial revolution and also occurred in quite a few different societies, so probably not as a general rule. There are a couple in England and France (Salisbury and Beauvais cathedrals) that are 700 years old, and if you include non-mechanical-clock timekeeping devices like sundials and water clocks then you can go back even further. I could imagine that it's quite possible that there was at least one instance where this was caught and people arranged for some kind of separate public clock, though
To add, I believe that town clocks probably also played a continuation of the church bells used to communicate the time to the village/town.
One of the main reasons Church bells and clock bells were so loud was to communicate to the area the current time.