In my past life, I was a community college instructor. My students ranged in age from about 20 and upward, although most were in their early twenties.
For years, I had an analogue clock mounted just above my office door. I often met with students in my office, and when I was pressed for time—not wanting to appear rude—I would casually glance at the clock above the door rather than look at my wristwatch. It was simply part of the office, always there and always useful.
One day, I asked a student what time we should meet again.
“Well, what time is it now?” they asked.
“The clock is right there,” I replied, pointing to the clock above my door.
They looked at it quizzically.
“I can’t tell the time from that.”
Then came the words that hit me like a ton of bricks:
“I never learned.”
This was a very bright student. It wasn’t a question of intelligence. They simply had never learned how to read an analogue clock.
I began asking questions.
“Where is the small hand pointing?”
“What do you mean, small hand?”
I explained the difference between the long hand and the short hand. The short hand indicates the hour, while the long hand indicates the minutes.
“The short hand is between 3 and 4,” the student said.
“So it’s 3-something. Now, where is the long hand pointing?”
“On the 6.”
“What’s five times six?”
“Thirty.”
“So it’s 3:30.”
“Oh!”
And that was it. In less than a minute, the student had learned how to read an analogue clock.
But I walked away from that conversation thinking about something much bigger than telling time.
A Different Way of Seeing the World
There has been no shortage of scholarly research and vigorous debate about how technology is affecting today’s young people. There are many theories about how smartphones, social media, and the digital world are influencing the way younger generations think, learn, and interact with the world around them.
As a community college instructor, I should probably have been more aware of generational differences and the impact that the digital revolution was having on my students.
Instead, I was making an assumption.
I assumed that the way we learned “way back when” was much the same as the way young people learn today.
Boy, was I wrong!
The difference isn’t simply that today’s young people have different opinions or different interests from previous generations. They have grown up experiencing the world in a fundamentally different technological environment.
My generation, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, experienced information at a much slower pace. We read newspapers, listened to the radio, watched television programs when they were broadcast, and communicated by telephone or letter.
Today’s young people have grown up surrounded by sound bites, fleeting images, notifications, text messages and instant access to virtually unlimited information.
Their everyday experiences are radically different from those of my generation.
Even something as basic as time can be viewed differently.
For my generation, we routinely described time as “quarter past,” “half past” or “quarter to.” We learned to look at an analogue clock and translate the position of its hands into a precise time.
Digital clocks changed that.
If a digital clock says 7:13, there is nothing to interpret. It tells you exactly what time it is.
There is no need to understand the relationship between the hour hand and the minute hand. No need to count by fives around the dial.
And don’t get me started on fractions!
“We Took Them Down Because the Students Can’t Read Them”
The most remarkable confirmation of my student’s comment came several weeks later.
I noticed that the analogue clocks throughout the college classrooms, remnants of the days when the campus was a teachers’ college, were being replaced with digital clocks.
One day, I happened to speak with the facilities manager and asked him why.
His answer stopped me.
“We took them all down because the students can’t read them.”
Suddenly, I was back in my office with that student standing in front of me.
“I never learned.”
Now I understood.
The analogue clocks hadn’t become inaccurate. They hadn’t stopped working. They hadn’t become technologically obsolete.
The problem was that some of the people expected to use them could no longer interpret what they were seeing.
What Does This Mean for Antique Clocks?
I collect antique analogue clocks, so this generational change makes me both curious and somewhat sad.
For centuries, the analogue clock was one of the most familiar objects in everyday life. It was a tool, a work of craftsmanship and, in the case of mechanical clocks, an extraordinary example of engineering.
People didn’t simply look at a clock. They understood it.
Today, that relationship is disappearing.
I sometimes wonder whether there is a generation—and perhaps future generations—that will look at an antique mechanical clock and see nothing more than an attractive but irrelevant object from another time.
Will they appreciate the beauty of a hand-painted dial, the craftsmanship of a mahogany case or the ingenuity hidden behind the dial?
Will they understand why someone would want to own a clock that has to be wound, adjusted and occasionally repaired when a smartphone can tell them the time instantly and to the second?
I hope so.
Because an antique clock is about much more than telling time.
It represents craftsmanship, engineering, design and history. It is a tangible connection to a time when mechanical ingenuity was essential to everyday life.
And perhaps the changing relationship between young people and analogue clocks helps explain something else I have noticed in the antique-clock market.
It’s no wonder that analogue mechanical clocks are hitting some of their lowest price levels in years.
Consider my own recent experience.
I recently bought a circa-1835 Daniel Pratt Jr. reverse-column-and-splat 30-hour clock at auction.
The price?
$30 Canadian.
That’s approximately $24 U.S.
A nearly 200-year-old mechanical clock for thirty dollars.
I couldn’t help wondering whether the low price had something to do with the fact that fewer people today understand what they are looking at.
To someone who has grown up with smartphones and digital displays, an analogue clock—and particularly an antique mechanical clock—may seem old-fashioned, unnecessary or even pointless.
But to me, it is anything but pointless.
It is a piece of history.
It is craftsmanship.
It is ingenuity.
And it is a reminder of a time when knowing how something worked was almost as important as knowing what it did.
I still think about that student occasionally.
“I never learned.”
Perhaps that simple statement told me more about the changing world than any textbook or scholarly article could have.
The analogue clock may be disappearing from everyday life. But I hope we don’t lose our appreciation for the remarkable objects that taught generations of people how to understand time.
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