“In medieval and early modern societies, mechanical time was secondary to social time. What we now see as exquisite detail and craftmanship on early clocks exhibits socially meaningful information. Derek de Solla Price argues, ‘The first great clocks of medieval Europe were designed as astronomical showpieces, full of complicated gearing and dials to show the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets, to exhibit eclipses, and to carry through the involved computations of the ecclesiastical calendar. As such they were comparable to the orreries of the 18th century and to modern planetariums; that they also showed the time and rang it on bells was almost incidental to their main function' (1959: 86). In other words, the positions of celestial bodies were more important than the time of the day. The movement of the stars was a way to discern auspicious and inauspicious days, weather, the growth of crops, and medical information about the human body. The ‘hour’ of the day, the temporal hour, was also uneven, divided into equal units of daylight and night. Many early mechanical clocks (fourteenth-century Europe) did not have a minute hand, and if they did, it needed to be periodically corrected using a sundial. In East Asia after the Jesuits introduced clocks, these mechanical devices became markers of wealth and prestige. In Edo society (seventh-to nineteenth-century Japan) craftsmen added a second folio so that these status symbols could follow the temporal hour. Mechanical time had to be adjusted to social time.”