The Clockmaker Family Meyer and Their Watch Keeping the alla turca Time

Abstract

Praying five-times-a-day is one of the most important religious obligations for Muslims, and prayers should be performed during certain periods defined by the position of the Sun at a given location. Before the full adoption of the international standard time in Turkey in the twentieth century, the mean solar time, popularly called “European time” (alla franca time) started to be used in the major cities of the Ottoman Empire, mainly in communication and transportation networks connecting the Empire with European countries. Thus both the solar mean time and the local apparent time (Turkish time or the alla turca time) were concurrently used in the Ottoman Empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The present paper examines the mechanism of alla turca clocks and especially the pocket watch designed and manufactured by J. Meyer (1843–1920) in Istanbul for keeping automatically both the Turkish and European times.