Leon Gassman, age 10, or Orem, Utah, for his question:

Who invented our way of telling time?

We cannot name a certain person because our way of telling time grew up gradually, in easy stages. A thousand years ago, people were rather vague about the time of day. They divided the daylight hours into three periods called tides    morning tide, noontide and eventide. In those days, of course, they lived much closer to nature. They did their farm chores and home chores during the daylight hours and went to bed with the sun. There was no need for precise hours, minutes and ticking seconds.

But about 600 years ago, more people were organized to do handicrafts in workshops. At about this time, mechanical clocks became popular and small divisions were needed to tick off the passing moments. Nobody :mows who invented the system. But in the lath century it became fashionable to set up town clocks with 12 hours for the day and 12 hours for the night. These clocks also were fitted with chimes, so that people could count the hours, even when they could not read the figures on the face of the clock.