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>Stanley Mazor
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>Clocks, Culture, Contrast
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>Stan will contrast the development of the clock in the eastern and western cultures
>and describe a confluence of conditions that "propel technology" in the west:
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>-European bell towers get synchronized with clocks
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>-The development of gears for clocks contributes to developing water mills,
>     windmills, and steam engines
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>-Bubonic plague creates a labor shortage in Europe motivating the machine
>     age in the west
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>-Asia has no plague, no labor shortage, and western clocks "don't work"
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>Stan Mazor worked on the design of Symbol, a high level language computer
>at Fairchild in 1967, and then helped develop the early Intel microcomputers.
>He has published extensively on the subject of chip design and Moore's law,
>and recently published a book on architecture, Design an Expandable House.
>Stan is in the Inventor's Hall of Fame, and has received the Kyoto Prize, the PC
>Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award, the Robert Noyce Award from SIA, and
>the Ron Brown American Innovator Award.
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Stan began his talk by explaining that it was based partly on Clocks and Culture by Carlo Cipolla and Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and partly on his own experiences. Key among those was his sabbatical in China (PRC) back in 1983, where he had a major culture shock when he realized there were people doing all kinds of things that would be automated in Silicon Valley. Things like metering traffic are done there by people and here by machines. Stan saw that they had no interest in automating those jobs, and it was contrary to his California life experiences.

Keeping time has long been a characteristic of western European systems. Stan listed a number of early clock designs including the sundial, water clock, hour glass, and marked candle. He explained that clocks with mechanical mechanisms to meter passing time first came into existence in the 1300 to 1600 time frames. At first they were mainly confined to bell tower ring synchronizing, but as the mechanisms improved with springs they got more widely used.

Before the modern era, clocks never developed in China and Japan. The Chinese peasants measured time in days and months, with the big moments being "planting time" and the like. The Chinese word for clock roughly translates as "self ringing bell". They were seen as novelties, and not many were imported because of that. In Japan, an hour was defined as "a sixth of the time between sun up and sun set", so western clocks never managed to tell the right time since the seasonal differences in the daylight, and the varying length hour were contrary to the western fixed hour clock design. Another factor was that the great plague wiped out about one-third of the population in Europe and caused an increase in wages, and a labor shortage. This motivated and "necessitated" augmented machine labor, which wasn't the case at all in the orient.

Stan thinks clock making technology improvements driven by the need for better clocks have had a bigger cumulative impact on the state of our technology than even the steam engine. He pointed out that a reliable and accurate watch has many small components that have to work very well together. He called it "The key machine of the industrial revolution" because of the way physics, mathematics, and practice are married in its mechanism.

Tian Harter