In principle, because the legitimacy of the emperor depended upon the harmony of the heavens, it was important that such early clocks be accurate, but they were not important in the way that a Westerner today would think of the importance of time, in terms of making or synchronizing a critical appointment with other people. The Western clock succeeded because it could be miniaturized and personalized, and because there was a greater practical and cultural need for clocks in the West. When missionaries later came to China one of the few things the Chinese approved of from the foreigner's culture was their mechanized clocks. One of the reasons that the Jesuits had such sophisticated clocks was their faith's great need for determining accurate daily time, as long ago in monasteries, there were fixed times for prayers. Europe's embrace of the clock allowed for the development of mechanized capitalism with a fixed schedule and capitalism allowed factories to churn out clocks. This made industrialized Great Britain the earliest producer of the mechanized clock...
Britain was eventually superseded by the Swiss, who abandoned much of their traditional agriculture crafts for the more profitable specialization of watch making. Then, in the 19th century, cheaper American mass manufacturing came to dominate the clock industry, and America was later taken over by the digital fluency of the Japanese in the 20th century.
Landes' Conclusions In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, David S. Landes analyzes the distribution of wealth in his study of world economics. Landes writes that the key to the current inequality between the rich and poor nations of the world stems directly from the industrial revolution, in which some countries made the leap to industrialization and became extremely rich, while
The Mechanical Clock has been invented in Europe in the 13th century, and, despite of the fact that it had been obvious that it would bring benefits to the world, it received little to no recognition from outside of Europe. Printing has been invented by the Chinese in the ninth century and later perfected by the Europeans, as the Chinese did not seem interested in the act. The Europeans became
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