From Clocks, a brief and picture-heavy book by Simon Fleet:
Small water-clocks were used in the Athenian Courts to limit the time a lawyer was allowed to speak. This led to those who filled the water-clocks being bribed by lawyers to fill only partially the container when rivals were pleading, and so reduce their opponents' allotted time, and the same thing used to happen in Rome under Pompey. There is a story that a Roman prisoner's life was saved by a pebble falling into a water-clock, which made the water drip so slowly that it gave extra time for some delayed evidence to arrive, which acquitted him of murder.
As Fleet notes elsewhere in the book, the timing of things down to the minute wasn't considered a necessity until the rise of the railroads in the nineteenth century. Up until that point, clocks were mostly considered a luxury. But duration, at the very least, was important in some respects, as in the Greek and Roman court systems. Perhaps it's not too surprising that the clocks of the time were sometimes used and abused in corrupt ways. Of course if you were an innocent man on trial for your life, you wouldn't object to their being a bit fallible.
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I did find a horological repair site called Clockworks that looks to sell new copies of this 1961 book. It sounds like it must be a pretty interesting read especially since it has more pictures than pages. The story about the man whose life was saved by a pebble falling into a water clock was a good one. Talk about running out of time.
I know that clocks have been around for ages - probably the oldest mechanical invention once sundials proved inconvenient to carry around. Of course, most of the old ones weren't going anywhere either not until Bruguet invented the pocket watch in 1775.
One of the fascinating aspects of the Aubrey and Maturin books was the ongoing search for the Longitude at sea. It had been well defined on land for a number of years but was much more difficult out on the billowing waves far from shore. Aubrey had a pair of matching marine chronometers that he relied on to tell him precisely where they were.. or close enough. I liked that fact about exact minutes not being required until the railway timetable was invented.
Speaking of old clocks I wonder if you've heard of the world's oldest astrological clock. Built in Prague in 1410 we saw the video mapping celebration of its 600th anniversary in 2010. I finally found a full video of the event on Kuriositas (haven't looked at that website in years).
https://www.kuriositas.com/2011/01/prague-astrological-clock-tower-video.html
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