He paced the room, halted, stood in front of the clepsydra and looked at the dropping water.
The bucket of the clepsydra had discharged, and with a jerk Saturn raised his scythe and pointed to the hour of midnight.
Plato is said to have invented a complicated clepsydra to indicate the hours of the night as well as of the day.
The clepsydra is said to have been known to the Egyptians.
The latter defect was remedied by keeping the level of the water in the clepsydra uniform, the volume of that discharged being noted.
In the clepsydra or hydraulic clock of Ctesibius of Alexandria, made about 135 B.
The Horologe which possibly next succeeded in date the invention of the Dial, was the Clepsydra or Water-Clock, the precise antiquity of which is however unknown.
But the sand glass as we know it was new to the European world, and you cannot but agree it was a far more practical article than was the clepsydra for it neither froze nor had to be replenished.
Stationed beside the clepsydra was a special officer whose duty it was not only to fill it but to stop the flow whenever a speaker was interrupted, thereby making certain he was not cheated of any of the time due him.
One example, from the Tower of the Winds (the clepsydra of Andronicus Cyrrhestes) at Athens, has only smooth pointed palm-leaves and no scrolls above a single row of acanthus leaves.
Tower of the Winds+ (the Clepsydra of Andronicus Cyrrhestes, 100 B.
In the use of the clepsydra and taper, time is measured in terms of a continuous movement or process; in the use of the pendulum time is measured in terms of a movement which is periodically reversed.
The pendulum, a comparatively modern invention, excelling the clepsydra and taper in precision, has altogether supplanted them as the servant of civilization.
In the clepsydra advantage is taken of the approximately uniform rate at which water escapes through a small orifice, and time is measured by gaging the loss of water from a discharging vessel or the gain in a receiving vessel.
When the Romans first began to use the clepsydra it was already a very good clock.
Less wonderful than the clock of the emperor, but more useful as an object of study, is the medieval clepsydra shown in Figure 7.
The great Plato is said to have turned his attention to commonplace things long enough to invent a clepsydra that would announce the hour by playing the flute.
In the clepsydra the trickling of water regulated the descent of the weight; in De Vick's clock the trickling of power or force from the escapement regulated the descent of the weight.
A similar use was made of the clepsydra in the courts of justice, first in Greece, and afterwards in Rome.
Nothing can from that knitted brow of hers those frowns dispel; For hard she finds it patient to abide till the clepsydra will have run its course.
The clepsydra had already accomplished three turns, and yet I roamed by the railing under the dryandra trees.
In the early days of the clepsydra in China, a certain time was allowed to dip up the water from the lowest jar, each morning and evening about five o'clock of our time, see Fig.
The only method of measuring time with any accuracy in private houses was the clepsydra or water-clock, which measured the time intervals by the flow of a definite amount of water.
The clepsydra became in Greece a useful instrument to enforce the law in restricting loquacious orators and lawyers to reasonable limits in their addresses.
This latter was in classic times corrected by a clepsydra consisting of two vessels.
Ctesibus of Alexandra was the one who is believed first to have applied the toothed wheels to the clepsydra and this was about 140 B.
When the clepsydra was introduced from Egypt into Greece, and later into Rome, one was considered enough for each town and was set in the market-place or some public square.
We have already seen that the first purpose in marking time was merely for making appointments, but the clepsydra shows that, with its invention, mankind had already made some progress toward a new point of view.
Believed to have had a sundial on each of its eight faces and to have contained a clepsydra fed by a spring.
The clepsydra remained in use until clocks became superior to it in accuracy.
Thus, although the sun-dial, clepsydra and sand-glass are still much used, we find ourselves at last in the time and lands of clocks.
The most interesting human fact, however, about the clepsydra is that it involved an entirely different conception of the marking of time.
As late as the ninth century, a clepsydra was regarded as a princely gift.
Not long after this date we meet with frequent references to the placing of a clepsydra in the public square of some old city, or to its use in astronomical calculations.
The clepsydra appears to have been used throughout the Middle Ages in some European countries, and it lingered along in Italy and France down to the close of the fifteenth century.
If the clepsydra rises entirely from out the water, the flow will last still longer yet.
The name Clepsydra is given to a spring in Messenia by Pausanias (iv.
Kaltwasser supposes the name Clepsydra to have been given because such a spring was intermittent.
But the lawyer is always in a hurry; there is the clepsydra limiting his time, and the brief limiting his topics, and his adversary is standing over him and exacting his rights.
That the Pelasgicum actually did extend from the Aesculapieum to the Clepsydra we know from Lucian.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "clepsydra" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
