As the medieval passed into the modern, the practise of horology passed more and more out of the hands of scientists into the keeping of commercial workmen. The custodian of time was at first a priest, and finally a manufacturer. And this change was attended by a vast increase in the general use of timepieces, and the correspondingly greater influence of time upon society and men's way of living. The Middle Ages made clocks and watches; and clocks and watches make the age in which we live. CHAPTER EIGHT _The Watch that Was Hatched from the "Nuremburg Egg"_ In the second act of Shakespeare's play, _As You Like It_, when Touchstone, the fool, meets Jaques, the sage, he draws forth a sun-dial from his pocket and begins to moralize upon Time. Touchstone's dial must have looked like a napkin-ring, with a stem like that of a watch, by which to hold it up edgewise toward the sun, and a tiny hole in the upper part of the ring through which a little sunbeam could fall upon the inner surface whereon the hours were marked. This pinhole was perhaps pierced through a slide, which could be adjusted up or down according to the sun's position at the time of year. In principle, therefore, it was a miniature of the huge dial of Ahaz of more than two thousand years before. In another Shakespeare play, _Twelfth Night_, Malvolio is gloating in imagination over his coming luxury when he shall have married the heiress and entered upon a life of wealth and leisure. "I frown the while," says he; "and perchance wind up my watch, or play with my—some rich jewel." There, in those two quotations, we have the whole meaning of the watch in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Touchstone's dial was a practical convenience—a thing to tell the time. Malvolio's watch was a piece of jewelry, an ornament indicating wealth and splendor. While watches had been well known for many years, people wore them chiefly for display and told time by means of pocket sun-dials. For the first watches we must go back to about the year 1500, shortly after America had been discovered, and when the great tower-clocks of de Vick and Lightfoot were not much more than a century old. In the quaint old town of Nuremberg there lived, at that time, one Peter Henlein, probably a locksmith. But a locksmith, in those days, would be an expert mechanic—more like a modern toolmaker; very likely an armorer also; capable of that fine workmanship in metal which we still wonder at in our museums. Nuremberg was then very much a medieval city, all red-tiled roofs and queer windows, where people went about dressed in trunks and jerkins and pointed caps and pointed shoes. It looked like _Die Meistersinger_, and _Grimm's Fairy Tales_, and pictures by Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish; very much like "Spotless Town," except that it was far from spotless.