What is the most horrible of institutions that ever entered human lives? Anyone, by the perceived notion of institutions might start listing education, family, marriage, state, religion etc. But, if we think once, all these institutions have something in common. They are all time - framed, time – bound, and submit us to conformity, which is again fitting itself into the framework of larger time that is life time. So, I would say, it is time that is the major institution that changed the face of our lives. Not only ours, but of course of the whole human society, be it in any part of the world. If you are someone like Plato, you would say, there is no such thing like time that is making life hard for us. Instead, it is the idea of time that is responsible for all the commotion. Well, I do agree with such people and say, “The Clock is the culprit”, and enquire how this dire consequence happened to us. Unfortunately, to track how this at all happened, we should still rely on time, gazing back at the past, so that our arguments would make some sense. By this, we could say that, time is eternal to our lives. It neither has a beginning nor ending. The entire creation moves on according to a time pattern. Time is one of those many necessary evils that happened to us.
Tracing back to history, we don’t have any evidence to suggest when the word ‘time’ derived or established semantically, but the word ‘clock’ is derived from the Latin word ‘clocca’ which means ‘bell’ or French word ‘cloche’, which again means the same. We were introduced to clocks only in the 14th century. It is in this period that people were familiarized with devices like sun dial, clepsydra or water clocks etc. Mechanical, tower and quartz clocks, with gears, wheels and weights attached to them were invented somewhere around the medieval period (5th – 15th century) in Europe. Be it towards human development or mechanization, this invention is of course a giant leap in the history of mankind.