Clockwise?

“Rotate the picture a bit clockwise, please,” I asked the assistant. The picture on the monitor turned anti-clockwise.

“No, clockwise.” He tried again, this time successfully.

We were doing a lap chole — a laparoscopic cholecystectomy (translation: key-hole surgery to remove the gallbladder) — and it’s essential to have a standard view of the puddings to get the correct orientation and recognition of the internal clockwork. Sometimes, rotating the camera one way has the opposite effect — it’s just how the optics are designed.

And this little problem gave me an idea. If you do a Creativity course, one of the things you learn is to look around the room, and try to imagine creative uses for whatever is in it. And this is where this series of little questions began. Of course, the chaps soon got wise to the questions, and when they changed rotas, the newcomers were briefed, to I had to keep thinking up new ones.

“So,” I said, “just why do clocks go clockwise?”

There was silence in the theatre. Just a simple question, but no answers were forthcoming. If I’d asked why you shouldn’t drink grapefruit juice when you are taking atorvastatin (a widely used anti-cholesterol drug), I’d have got a screed about enzyme induction in the liver. This simple question wasn’t what they were expecting.

I had to do a little prompting. I asked why clocks didn’t go anti-clockwise, and as they didn’t, there must be some sort of explanation.

The nurses got there in the end. “Sundials,” they said and, “they’re like the movement of the sun.”

“Yes, it must be like an imitation of the movement of the sun in the sky, or the movement of the shadow on an ordinary sundial. So at midday, when the sun is highest in the sky, the hour hand points directly upwards.” And if there’s a better answer, I don’t know it.

A supplementary question: “so, what does this tell you about the origins of clocks?”

Another long silence. I had to remind them of the motion of the sun, and where they had to look for it. And that the sundial’s gnomon points to the south. The penny eventually dropped. “In the northern hemisphere, of course.” 

Now, I do know that there are far older versions of clocks, candles with markings, and ancient water wheel like things. But I was thinking of mechanical clocks with the standard clock face.

But — how often is there a but — not all sundials go clockwise. Some, even in the northern hemisphere go anti-clockwise.

Even worse, there are mechanical clocks that go anti-clockwise — there’s one in Münster. There are two clocks on the Old Jewish Town hall in Prague; the upper is conventional, the lower goes anti-clockwise.

Some of the early mechanical clocks were very complicated; as well as the (local) time, there were rings and pointers for zodiacal signs etc — so complicated, that even with a guide book, it’s hard to work out what’s going on. Yet some at least of the population must have been able to read them when they were build — and this almost innate knowledge is something that has now been largely lost.