Mondo Knows Facts
Mechanical clocks began striking in medieval towers
An escapement regulated falling weights and let towns keep time through the night The key invention was the escapement, which released a falling weight in regular ticks, and it appears in European sources in the late thirteenth century. Towns installed clocks in church and civic towers, where bells told work hours to everyone within earshot. Salisbury Cathedral still runs a clock built around 1386. It sits in Mondo's history collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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🏛️ Historyfact 129 of 200
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Tags: clocks, timekeeping, medieval
Mechanical clocks began striking in medieval towers: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- An escapement regulated falling weights and let towns keep time through the night. The figure is taken from Science Museum, London, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a history fact?
- Yes. It sits on the History shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.