Some of the very first clocks invented in China were powered by water. Describe how you think this was done.

Video Transcript

This is College Physics Answers with Shaun Dychko. So the question is how would a Chinese water clock work and we can only guess here. Suppose you have a bucket of water, which is replenished by a steady slow stream of water coming in and there's a hole in the bottom of this bucket and you can control the size of this hole and control the rate of flow of water dripping out and we are gonna assume that the water drips out approximately the same rate at which water is replenished in the bucket from the stream so that this doesn't overflow and we don't want the level in this bucket to be changing because that would change the pressure and therefore the rate of water coming out of this hole. So assuming all that's constant, you are gonna have a constant rate of dripping into this cylinder here and water will collect at a given rate and then you will have a certain level of water at 8 am and then it will go up to another level at 10 am and these would be equally spaced intervals here assuming that the rate of dripping is constant and then if you get to this level here, it must be 2 pm... something like that.