The time had been, but a few generations earlier, when people had stood on the shores of the ocean and had wondered what might lie beyond their sight. That water stretched out to the "edge of the world" they felt sure, but what there happened to it they could not tell. Surely, however, it must be peopled with monsters and demons. It was foolhardy to venture too far from land. We can hardly realize what a piece of insane rashness it must have seemed to most people when Columbus sailed out boldly into this vast mystery, nor how the world was thrilled when he brought back word of strange lands and strange peoples he had found beyond the horizon. But by the time now reached in our story the oceans had become highways of trade, and men were beginning to draw those strange, crude maps of the continents, which make us smile until we stop to think how maps might have looked had they been left for us to make. At all events, the problems involved in navigation were being much discussed in every land. One of the greatest of these problems was to discover the whereabouts of the ship at any given time. When one is out of sight of land the sense of location necessarily becomes inoperative; one wave looks like another, and there are winds and currents which might carry a ship hundreds of miles out of its course unless there were some way of knowing its true position. At first, the stars, and later the compass gave help in giving _direction_ but not in showing _position_. How might this be done? There was no possible way in which the element of telling time did not enter. [Illustration: Table Watch in Drum-Shaped Case, Nuremburg, before 1560 One of the Oldest Watches in Existence Table Clock by Bartholomew Newsom London, 1565 Enormous Repeater Watch Newsom, London, 1565 Large Brass Table Clock Dutch, Seventeenth Century FIRST FORMS OF THE WATCH _Types of table clocks and two of the oldest watches in existence In the collections of the Metropolitan Museum._]