Consider, for example, the earliest examples of mechanical clocks in the 14th century.
Only with the advent of mechanical clocks in western Europe at the end of the 13th century did seasonal (unequal) hours become inconvenient.
Although not as prominent as in the Song period, contemporary Chinese texts of the Ming Dynasty (1368 1644) described a relatively unbroken history of mechanical clocks in China, from the 13th century to the 16th.
For example, one legendary routine on "Your Show of Shows," the clock sketch, presents the burlesque-y fable of a mechanical clock in Bavaria that every hour propelled life-size automatons played by Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris out its doors to chime the bells.
The earliest weight-driven mechanical clock in England was installed by Edward III in the Round Tower in 1354.
The clock tower featured large astronomical instruments of the armillary sphere and celestial globe, both driven by an early intermittently working escapement mechanism (similarly to the western verge escapement of true mechanical clocks appeared in medieval clockworks, derived from ancient clockworks of classical times).
Mechanical clocks became widespread in the 14th century, when they were used in medieval monasteries to keep the regulated schedule of prayers.
In a single line of evolution, Su Song's clock therefore united the concept of the clepsydra and the mechanical clock into one device run by mechanics and hydraulics.
Clocks were first built in England in the late 13th century, and the first mechanical clocks were certainly being installed in cathedrals and abbeys by the 1320s.
Joseph Needham states that this was perhaps the ancestor of all clock jacks that would later sound the hours found in mechanical clocks by the 8th century, but he notes that these figures did not actually move like clock jack figurines or sound the hours.
In the 11th century, Chinese inventors and engineers invented the first mechanical clocks driven by an escapement mechanism.
