Clockmaking is an advanced art, having been practiced by the dwarves for centuries. Timekeeping is based on the practical dwarvish approach of dividing the day into quarters and the quarters into further quarters.
\nClocks have one dial, divided into quarters, sixteenths and sixty-fourths with markings of different size and colour. The largest of the four hands moves round once in a day. The next hand moves round once for each sixteenth day. The third hand moves round once every 1\/256th day, and the smallest hand moves round the dial once every 1\/4112th day. The hands are stacked, smallest on top, and the traditional colours are:
\n\u2022 Quarter marks: black, extending to the centre.
\n\u2022 Sixteenth marks: blue, extending a quarter of the way to the centre.
\n\u2022 Sixty-fourth marks: red, extending a sixteenth of the way to the centre.
\n\u2022 Largest hand: gold (substituted by brass in cheaper clocks).
\n\u2022 Second-largest hand: silver (substituted by pewter).
\n\u2022 Third-largest hand: copper.
\n\u2022 Smallest hand: steel.
\nThese conventions have been adopted as a shorthand way of referring to the time. “Gold three blacks”, for example, means three-quarters through the day (about 6pm), while “Gold three blacks, silver three blues” would indicate just before 6:20pm. “A steel-red” is four-tenths of a second; “wait a steel-red” means “hold on a moment”.
\nThe following is a conversion chart to hours, minutes and seconds, based on a day of 25.53 hours, with some of the less useful numbers removed:<\/p>\n
Gold Silver Copper Steel
\nWhole
\nH 25.5 1.6
\nM 1531.8 95.7 6.0 0.4
\nS 91908.0 5744.3 359.0 22.4
\nBlack
\nH 6.4 0.4
\nM 383.0 23.9 1.5 0.1
\nS 22977.0 1436.1 89.8 5.6
\nBlue
\nH 1.6
\nM 95.7 6.0 0.4
\nS 5744.3 359.0 22.4 1.4
\nRed
\nH 0.4
\nM 23.9 1.5 0.1
\nS 1436.1 89.8 5.6 0.4<\/p>\n
The number of divisions is counted from the top, and clocks run, by our standards, anticlockwise (which bolsters some theories that dwarves originated in the southern hemisphere, where that is the direction of a sundial). However, dwarves do everything right-to-left, or “strong to weak”, as they say, so this is not conclusive.
\nThe advent of the dwarven railroad has made the change of times from east to west an issue for more people than was the case when only a few could travel fast enough to notice it. So far, nobody has come up with a good solution.
\nAsterist temples traditionally have large, four-faced clocks mounted above them on towers where they can be easily seen. The clocks chime a deep bell every gold-blue and a high bell every silver-black throughout the daylight hours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"content-type":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"wiki_cats":[],"wiki_tags":[50],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yada_wiki\/1708"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yada_wiki"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/yada_wiki"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yada_wiki\/1708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1772,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yada_wiki\/1708\/revisions\/1772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"wiki_cats","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wiki_cats?post=1708"},{"taxonomy":"wiki_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wiki_tags?post=1708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}