Strike the bells
Specialist. Morsk. Show current time. /i> From the custom of ringing the ship's bell when turning over a glass hourglass. BMS 1998, 527.
Large dictionary of Russian sayings. - M: Olma Media Group. V. M. Mokienko, T. G. Nikitina. 2007 .
Strike the bells. Specialist. Morsk. Show current time. /i> From the custom of ringing the ship's bell when turning over a glass hourglass. BMS 1998, 527. Hand over under bottles what. Jarg. Morsk. Leave something. for storage to whom l. /i> From custom... ... Large dictionary of Russian sayings
beat- I hit, you hit; hit; bi/ty; bit, a, o; (obsolete), biya/; nsv. see also hit 1) a) with something, something to hit, pound. Hit the anvil with a hammer. Kicking the door. Clap your hands. Beat... Dictionary of many expressions
Hit, hit; led hit; prib. suffering past beaten, bit, a, o; deepr. (obsolete) biy; nesov. 1. Hit, pound. Somewhere, at a high altitude, they started hitting the column with a sledgehammer. S. Antonov, First position. If several people are threshing, you cannot use a flail... ... Small academic dictionary
- (To beat) to strike, strike, pound, strike, produce signals by striking some sounding object. Beat dawn, fraction, gathering, alarm, etc. and give appropriate signals on the drum. B. smash the enemy, strike, ... ... Naval Dictionary
Hit, hit; hit; broken; bit, a, o; (obsolete) biy; nsv. 1. in what, for what. Hit, pound. B. hammer on an anvil. B. kick in the door. B. clapping. B. on the ball (in games with a ball, puck: point in the right direction). B. on goal (in football... Encyclopedic Dictionary
Flasks- hourglass on the ship. 4 hour, hour, half hour, minute, half minute and 15 second respectively were used. with the necessary use (for example, for calculating watch time when measuring the speed of a vessel with a hand log, etc.), most... ... Russian humanitarian encyclopedic dictionary
This term has other meanings, see Rynda. The ship's bell on the Polish warship Rynda is well-established in Russian ... Wikipedia
If you look closely at the engravings that decorate the title pages of ancient maritime books, you will see on many of them images of things that faithfully served the navigators of the past for hundreds of years and helped turn the art of navigation into a science that is practically accessible to everyone.
Your gaze will first of all stop at the anchor, although it is not too similar to modern ones, and even to that traditional, long-familiar anchor that we are used to seeing on naval buttons and sailor belt buckles. You will also find a scroll of cards here, which are also not very reminiscent of the ones you started using back in school. You will see a compass card with an intricately painted “Nord” rhumb, and a star globe, and a faceted lot weight, and a sector of a hand log, and a spyglass, and... a strange device that looks like two large bottles connected by their necks and enclosed in a fence from wooden slats. Such a device cannot be found on any ship today, except in the cabin of a devotee of maritime antiquities.
But there was a time when not a single captain would have dared to go on a long voyage without such a device, which served to measure and store time. To put it simply, it was a sea hourglass.
For centuries, sailors dreamed of watches that were comfortable enough, not too heavy, relatively accurate and reliable, until they finally appeared in the 16th century. Clocks have existed since ancient times. Before hourglasses came to ships, people had long been able to measure time. Even the Egyptian priests, thousands of years ago, drew attention to the uniformity of the visible movement of the Sun. They came up with first primitive, and then more advanced sundials, which showed time with an accuracy of one or two minutes. But such watches were not suitable for sailors. Firstly, they “worked” only during the day, and only in clear weather. Secondly, the sundial was a stationary time indicator, showing, as we say now, only “local time”, and ships, as we know, do not stand still. Such watches were unsuitable for them.
Later, in the 2nd millennium BC. e., someone in Rome noticed the uniformity of drops of liquid falling from a leaky vessel. The tenacious human mind immediately seized on this phenomenon, and soon a water clock appeared - a clepsydra. Although their accuracy was not great, it turned out to be sufficient for those times.
However, even water clocks were not suitable for sailors. As soon as the clepsydra was tilted a little, it began to lie shamelessly. During a storm, water splashed out of the vessels and such clocks generally refused to work, but is it conceivable to imagine a ship whose deck does not sway?
When the hourglasses came to the ships, they behaved much more steadily during the motion. They could be closed hermetically, but the readings of such watches did not change. And they suited the sailors quite well at that time. Quite quickly, hourglasses became simply irreplaceable on ships. And yet, after serving for less than 300 years, they retired forever. However... These clumsy watches managed to serve such a great service to sailors that they are still remembered every half hour on the ships of the fleet.
In Russia, the hourglass in the navy came into general use in 1720, when Peter I introduced his Naval Charter. At that time, according to the supply sheet, each ship was assigned a half-hour and a four-hour hourglass. The sharp-tongued sailors very soon dubbed the half-hour clock “flasks.” The four o'clock received a less expressive name.
The same Naval Charter divided the ship's day into six equal periods of time, called the German word Wacht- "guard". The sailors quickly remade it in the Russian way. It turned out to be a “watch”. In this form, this word took root in the fleet.
Ship watches were a great innovation: before that, all assignments to work and their duration, as well as rest periods, were made by eye and ultimately depended on the will of the ship's commander. Now he divided his work and rest time, strictly based on the paragraph of the charter and the readings of his watch. If the sailor stood a four-hour watch or worked the allotted time, go and rest. If you have rested for four hours, go back on duty or do ship work. And no bickering, no arguing about who had to work harder. A strict order emerged. And breakfast on time, on time, and lunch, and dinner. In a word, mode! And where there is regime and order, there is discipline. Where there is discipline, the work is done better. This has become an axiom, valid both for past times and for our days. Today it’s hard to even imagine how ships sailed when there were no watches.
This is the German word that gave the four-hour hourglass its nickname. And the “flasks” and “watches” settled firmly on the quarterdeck of the ships. It seemed that they would never give up their place and their purpose to anyone. Moreover, at the end of the 18th century. (that is, more than two hundred years later than X. Huygens created the pendulum clock), on Russian warships another hourglass was added to the “flasks” and “watches”, calculated exactly for an hour. They all stood important in the designated place, and the entire crew of the ship treated these glass idols with due respect. Of course! After all, on the ship it was a kind of “temple of time.” The sailor on watch, specially assigned for this purpose, performed sacred acts near the bottles, like a priest-keeper of time.
Probably, our distant ancestors also carefully maintained the flame in the hearth in those days when people already knew how to use fire, but had not yet learned how to make it. At that time, an extinguished fire sometimes meant the death of a tribe.
Staying on a ship without a concept of time does not mean, of course, dying. But this, of course, means the loss of the basis of order and, what is even more terrible, the loss of any idea of \u200b\u200bthe longitude at which the ship is located.
In the years in question, many navigators (and not only sailors) already quite clearly understood what geographic latitude and longitude were. Knowing latitude and longitude, people could easily find any point on the map. And they were able to determine latitude quite accurately, even when separated from the shores. For example, in the Northern Hemisphere, it was enough to measure the angle between the North Star and the horizon. In degrees, this angle expressed the latitude of the place. There were other ways to determine latitude that provided sufficient accuracy for safe navigation. But with the determination of longitude things did not go well for a long time.
The best minds of mankind tried to find a way to determine longitude that would satisfy sailors. Back at the beginning of the 16th century. Galileo Galilei worked to solve this problem. In 1714, the English government announced a huge prize to anyone who could find a way to determine longitude at sea with an accuracy of half a degree. Around the same time, a special Bureau of Longitudes was created in England. But things were moving slowly. And this was all the more annoying because the key to solving the problem had been found a long time ago - an accurate clock! That's all the sailors needed to accurately determine longitude at sea. After all, the Sun completes its apparent motion around the Earth in exactly 24 hours. During this time it travels all 360 degrees of longitude. This means that in one hour the star moves west by 15 degrees. Therefore, knowing the difference between Greenwich time (taken as zero) and local (ship's) time at any point where the ship is located, longitude can be determined by simple calculation. But the trouble was that recognizing this difference was far from easy. It’s easy to find out the ship’s time: you just need to accurately notice the moment when the Sun above the ship reaches its highest point. And Greenwich time, at first glance, is even easier to calculate: before sailing, just set your watch to Greenwich time and do not move the hands. But in those days there were no accurate astronomical clocks (chronometers, as they were later called), and the pocket watches that were already available went very inaccurately: some ran ahead, others lagged behind by an unknown amount, or even stopped altogether. And sailors still preferred to use flasks, without thinking about determining longitude accurate enough for navigation, which required watches with a fraction of a second deviation from true time. It seemed impossible to create such a watch back then. Peter I, for example, equated the attempt to determine the exact longitude of a place with attempts to invent a “perpetual motion machine” or turn cheap metals into gold, that is, he considered it completely fruitless.
Analyzing the sea voyages of medieval sailors, experts noticed that they sailed, from our point of view, somehow strangely: first they went north or south, and only then, having reached the desired latitude, they turned west or east at a right angle and walked, trying to keep to the achieved latitude. This method of sailing required additional time, unnecessary setting of sails, etc. But still, it was more reliable at sea, since the navigator knew at least one of the coordinates - latitude - for sure. However, such a voyage also did not give complete confidence that the ship would arrive at the desired point. And sometimes this led to funny things. Thus, the Spanish expedition of Mendaña de Neira discovered in 1567-1569. Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean. But not a single navigator could later find them, until two centuries later the French expedition of Louis Antoine de Bougainville “discovered” the “disappeared” archipelago again.
Even when relatively accurate marine chronometer clocks appeared, determining the exact longitude remained a very difficult matter. Already in the 19th century, when it was necessary to determine the longitude of the Pulkovo meridian with the greatest possible accuracy (this was necessary for the normal operation of the newly built observatory), the exact time had to be “carried” by ship from Greenwich. An entire expedition was equipped for this purpose. Chronometers were collected from ships of the Russian fleet. There were less than a dozen of them in all of Russia. And when, with the advent of the telegraph, the accepted longitude of the Pulkovo Observatory was checked, it turned out that the longitude was not determined entirely accurately.
But all this happened much later. And at the beginning of the 18th century, under Peter I, at exactly noon, the entire three hourglasses turned over and, so that everyone on the ship knew about it, special strikes were heard on the ship’s bell. From that moment on, the carefully washed, sifted and dried sand in the “flasks” again began to pour from the upper reservoirs to the lower ones. And the sailor - the “keeper of time” warily guarded the moment when their upper tank was emptied. When the last grains of sand fell through the narrow hole between the flasks, he instantly turned the “flasks” over, and everything started all over again. This operation required the utmost attention and vigilance. Not everyone could be trusted with this. It is not for nothing that in those days there was an expression in the navy “to hand over under a bottle,” which meant “to hand over under reliable guard.”
It was troublesome and expensive to store time on the ship. To do this, it was necessary to maintain special people. According to Peter's decree, the senior man above them was the “flask master”, who was responsible for the proper maintenance of the watch. All these people were not sitting idle. Every half hour one clock had to be turned over, every hour another, and every four hours another. And so that everyone on the ship knew that they were vigilantly and vigilantly monitoring the passage of time, precisely performing all operations, the crew was notified by an audible signal - striking the ship’s bell: “they struck a bottle.” Of course, no one broke the “flasks” themselves. On the contrary, the sailors cherished their fragile glass watches like the apple of their eyes, especially in a storm. Knowing the harsh conditions of the ocean, they lashed in advance (that is, firmly fastened) all objects that could move and damage them. The watches themselves were carefully inserted into special slots lined with soft felt.
The bell into which the bottles were “beaten” was small, 26-50 centimeters high. It appeared on ships much earlier than the “flasks”. It was believed that the ringing of these bells scared away the evil forces that inhabited the seas and oceans. In addition, already at the dawn of navigation, helmsmen realized that they needed a bell to prevent collisions with other ships. There were no other means of notifying oneself then. Typhons and whistles had not yet been invented; the dim light of the ship's lanterns, filled with oil, was difficult to notice even on a clear night. You won’t be burning a torch all the time, but the bell is always ready for action, and its ringing is difficult to confuse with anything else. It carries far and wide around both day and night, and its sound does not get stuck even in thick fog. It is not surprising that it was the ship’s bell that was adapted to “beat off the bells.”
At half past twelve the bells rang once in one direction. Each hour, one double strike was made on both sides of the bell; for the masters of “beating bells,” this strike was almost continuous. At half past one, one double strike and one single strike were made, and so on until the end of the watch, adding a strike in one direction every half hour. At the end of the watch, four double strikes were struck—eight “flasks”—and it all started all over again. A new watch was starting. To step on it and take a watch simultaneously with the last stroke of the four o'clock bell in the fleet has always been considered a sign of good manners and high maritime culture. This is understandable - time on ships has always been valued and respected!
Ship bells are still found today on every warship and on all ships of the merchant fleet. They are cast from a special “bell metal”: an alloy of copper, tin and zinc. The “voice” of the bell depends on the proportion in which they are incorporated into the alloy. In the past, bells turned out to be especially euphonious if silver was added to the alloy from which they were cast. In our practical times, of course, we do without precious metals. Once upon a time, “personal” bells with raised letters of its name and year of construction were cast for each ship. Nowadays, the name of the ship is engraved on the lower edge of the bell along the circumference.
For a long time, ships have treated the bell with respect. And today, like hundreds of years ago, sailors polish ship bells and other, as sailors say, “coppers” to a shine, meaning various parts made of copper. If the bell is kept in order, it is clear that the naval service on this ship is being carried out regularly. Every half hour, the sailor on watch takes up a short tackle attached to the “tongue” of the bell - it is called a “bowlin bell” - and beats the “flasks”. Hearing the ringing of the bell, all crew members will unmistakably know what time it is and whether it’s time for them to get ready for watch. Our Ship's Charter still retains the command: “Break the bottles!” This is a naval tradition!
Nowadays, ships have typhons, whistles, howlers, speakers and megaphones that amplify the human voice many times over. There are radios and other means of warning ships that are dangerously close to each other. But the ship's bell has not lost its original purpose even today. And when somewhere, for example in the English Channel (English Channel), an impenetrable fog suddenly falls on the sea, the watch officer comes onto the bridge and gives the command: Ring the bell!
By the way, it was from this phrase that the name with which Russian sailors “christened” the ship’s bell came.
Creating a regular fleet, Peter I began to borrow terms and commands from foreign-language fleets, and he “borrowed” this command: Ring the bell! (“Ring the bell!”). The officers gave this command in English, and the sailors obediently carried it out, without thinking about the meaning of the words, and very soon they remade this foreign command in their own way. “Beat the ryndu!” - they got it in harmony. The team has taken root in the fleet. And since you can beat someone or something, soon the ship’s bell itself began to be called a bell. Strictly speaking, this is not true. In the days of the sailing fleet, a bell was called a special sound of a ship's bell. Every day, when the sun reached its zenith, the ship struck triple strikes three times, notifying the crew that true noon had arrived. This threefold ringing of bells was called the bell. The custom of “beating the bell” has become obsolete, and its name was transferred to the bell, which is now sometimes called the bell.
Having served in the navy for centuries, the ship's bell still serves on military and commercial ships.
Over time, the need to mark the time of noon appeared on the shore, and above all in the capital of the Russian Empire - St. Petersburg.
For a long time it was believed that the noon shot from the wall of the Peter and Paul Fortress was introduced by Peter I, but this is not so. This idea was first born after the death of Peter the Great. The idea was to give residents of St. Petersburg the opportunity to accurately set wall or pocket clocks once a day, and for ordinary people to know that it was noon.
This need arose especially acutely in the second half of the 18th century due to the rapid development of trade and navigation. The clock strikes from the bell tower of St. Peter and Paul did not reach the outskirts of the expanding "city of Petrov", the southern border of which then ran along the Fontanka, and the northern - along Bolshoy Prospekt of the Petrograd Side. Professor of astronomy, mathematician Joseph Delisle, who came to St. Petersburg from Paris at the invitation of Peter himself back in 1724 and was appointed director of the astronomical observatory, presented on December 22, 1735 at the next meeting of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences a report on a method of giving a loud sound signal.
Delisle proposed firing a shot from the Admiralty upon a signal from the tower of the Kunstkamera, where the then astronomical observatory was located and there were “good meridians and correct clocks,” but this project was veiled - the bureaucracy in the Russian state was always in force. In the 19th century On the Pulkovo Heights, the buildings of one of the largest in the world, the Main Russian Observatory, grew up, which was responsible for the tasks of practical astronomy, including the measurement of time.
In 1863, precise Pulkovo time signals began to be transmitted by wire to the central telegraph office, and from there to railway stations throughout the Russian Empire. At the end of 1864, a cable from a special clock located at the Central Telegraph was installed to one of the cannons that stood in the Admiralty yard, and on February 6, 1865, the signal cannon announced the arrival of noon for the first time. The time was strictly adjusted to the astronomical clock of the Pulkovo Observatory. The midday shot from the Admiralty Court thundered every day until September 23, 1873. Then the shipyard here ceased to exist, and the firing position had to be moved to the Naryshkinsky bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress. There, until July 1934, the signal cannon struck 12 noon every day at exactly noon.
The years flew by, the guns on the bastion were updated, one generation of bombardiers replaced another, but this tradition has been preserved to this day.
Many people believe that it exists only in the city on the Neva, and are deeply mistaken. In Vladivostok, a peaceful shot also rings out from the top of the Tigrovaya hill at exactly 12:00 local time. It was first heard here on August 30, 1889. This tradition continued until the last war. Then the gun was silent for some time. It was decided to restore it on October 10, 1970.
By the way, residents and sailors of the Kronstadt fortress also used to set their watches by the shot of a cannon installed on the shore of the harbor in Petrovsky Park.
To strike noon every day is a tradition that we inherited from the Russian Navy. She should not be forgotten, she should be sacredly honored and remembered.
In the old days, time was measured on ships using hourglasses, which sailors called “flasks.” Here are several quotes from literary works that mention the maritime time system:
Both boats set sail from the Hispaniola about half past one, or, to put it in nautical terms, when three bells struck.(R. Stevenson, “Treasure Island”, translation by N. Chukovsky)
When the two bells for the night watch sounded - or, to put it as they say on land, the hour struck one in the morning - the command thundered from the forecastle: “All up! Reduce sail!(J. London, “Typhoon off the coast of Japan”, translation by A. Krivtsova and V. Zhitomirsky)
The morning, as usual, was lovely. Four bells have just struck - ten o'clock(K. Stanyukovich, “Around the World on the Korshun”)
That same day, after lunch, when eight bells were rung on the ship’s bell, a steamer appeared on the horizon, heading in the opposite direction.(A. Novikov-Priboy, “Tsushima”)
Raising the flag at three bells in the afternoon. Sailors must appear dressed in uniform(G. Melville, “The White Pea Jacket”, translation by I. Likhachev)
Somewhere on the pier, probably on board the Winged One, the chime of ship bells was heard, and the cathedral clock, as if in response, struck midnight(R. Shtilmark, “The Heir from Calcutta”)
Task 1. How many bells rang on board the Winged One?
Task 2. Determine how long the watch lasts on sea vessels. Explain your decision.
Task 3. Here is another quote from the novel “Treasure Island”:
- Why don’t you ask what hours you can find me? I take from noon to six bottles.
Until what time does one of the characters in the novel, the former pirate Ben Gunn, “receive” visitors? Why does he say “from noon” and not “from so many bottles”?
Task 4. Fill in the blank in the following quote with one word:
...the service went further, marking with the chiming of bells each bottle destroyed by it and thrown overboard<пропуск>lives of one thousand two hundred people(L. Sobolev, “Major repairs”)
Using the data in the matching problem (for example, 01:00 - two bottles), determine how many hours the “flask cycle” lasts and what one bottle is equal to.
Hint for task 4. The word “life” is in the singular genitive case.
We are given the following correspondences:
01:00 - two bottles;
10:00 - four bells;
01:30 or 13:30 (it is not clear from the quote whether the boats set sail from the Hispaniola during the day or at night) - three bells.
Obviously, the bottle cycle does not coincide with either the 24-hour day or the 12-hour cycles and, apparently, is less than them.
Let the boats set sail at night. Then the bottle is half an hour. We know two reference points: midnight (follows from the first correspondence) and eight o'clock in the morning (follows from the second correspondence). It can be assumed that the bottle cycle lasts eight hours and there are three of them in a day: 00:00–08:00, 08:00–16:00, 16:00–24:00. But what then is eight bells after dinner? It's either 12:00 or 20:00. Both are implausible. In addition, we know that there are also “three bells in the afternoon.” It is logical to assume that noon is the starting point, that is, a new cycle also begins with it. Then we come to the hypothesis that the bottle cycle lasts four hours and that there are six of them in a day: 00:00–04:00, 04:00–08:00, 08:00–12:00, 12:00–16:00 , 16:00–20:00, 20:00–24:00. This hypothesis explains all the data well. No other cycle length will allow us to do this (unless we assume that not all cycles are the same length, but we have no reason for this. In addition, such a hypothesis will not allow us to complete task 2).
Let us now assume that the boats set sail during the day (and they did). The bottle, again, turns out to be equal to half an hour, and we have three reference points: noon, midnight, eight in the morning. We come to the same hypothesis.
Task 1. At midnight, the last (eighth) half hour of the 20:00–24:00 cycle expires, which means eight bell strikes should sound. Answer: eight.
Task 2. It is logical to assume that the bottle cycle is a watch. Answer: four hours.
Task 3. Six bottles can correspond to eleven o'clock in the morning, three o'clock in the afternoon, seven o'clock in the evening, etc. - a total of six options. Ben Gunn does not indicate in any way which six bells of which watch he is talking about, however, he is confident that his interlocutor will understand him. The only logical assumption we can make is this: we are talking about the same watch as the first time reference - noon. Then six bells means three o’clock in the afternoon, and then it’s clear why in this context it’s impossible to say “eight bells” instead of “noon”: it will be unclear which eight and which six bells we are talking about. In addition, noon on sea vessels had a special status (see Afterword).
Task 4. Half an hour (that is, one bottle).
Timekeeping systems are usually based on some kind of natural cycles: the cycle of day and night, the phases of the Moon, the rotation of the Earth around the Sun. For sailors, however, almost the most important is the artificial cycle - the watch cycle. On sea vessels, the day is divided into six four-hour watches, and it is, of course, convenient for sailors and officers on watch to know what part of their duty has already passed and when to change. In the old days, an hourglass was used for this - flasks. At the beginning of each watch, the four-hour bottles were turned over, but in addition, the half-hour bottles were also turned over every half hour. When the first half hour elapsed, this was marked by one strike of the ship's bell, the second by two, the third by three, and so on until eight. Thus, any crew member could find out which bottle it was.
As can be seen from the quotes, flasks are called not only hourglasses, but also the strikes of the bell, as well as the half-hour intervals themselves. This is called metonymic transfer, or transfer of meaning by contiguity. It is alleged that in the navy there was also an expression “to hand over under a bottle”, initially - “to hand over for safekeeping to a sentry”, later - “to hand over for safekeeping”.
Noon, as already mentioned, had a special status. In the Russian fleet from the beginning of the 17th to the beginning of the 18th century, it was with it that the new day began, and sea time was 12 hours ahead of civil time. Since the 18th century, at noon, instead of eight bells, they “beat a bell”: they beat off three triple blows. It is believed that the word bell came into Russian as part of the expression beat the bell, which in turn is an unusual borrowing: a corruption of the English command ring the bell! On English and American ships, the usual eight bells were struck at noon - but only after the captain or officer of the watch, with the help of a sextant, was convinced that noon had really arrived, that is, that the crew had not gone astray, measuring time with an hourglass (the accuracy of the bells themselves is also periodically monitored); see the painting “Eight Flasks”.
Returning to Ben Gunn, we note that in the original he says “from about noon observation [i.e. e. regular determination of the ship’s coordinates] up to about six bells” (from about noon observation to about six bells). The translator omitted the midday observation, apparently for the sake of simplicity, and why he decided to remove both “approximately”, which sound natural in the mouth of a savage living on an island, is not entirely clear.
In general, it should be remembered that the material of the problem does not reflect real using a flask frame of reference (and certainly not modern), and her image in fiction. However, there is reason to believe that the authors and translators had a good idea of how the sailors actually spoke.
Nowadays, sailors, of course, do not use hourglasses, but they continue to strike bells, and the ship's charter of the Russian Navy instructs the officer of the watch to monitor the correctness of their beating.
In conclusion, speaking about flasks from a linguistic point of view, it is worth explaining the etymology of the word itself. Bottle, previously bottle, comes from the word st b beggar. Dedicated b denotes a special vowel sound that existed in the Old Russian language - the so-called reduced. There were two reduced ones: [b] - something like a short [e] and [b] - something like a short [o]. By the 13th century they were lost: in some positions they disappeared (linguists say Pali), in some - turned (linguists say cleared up) into ordinary [e] and [o].
In a word glass reduced, according to the general rule (see Havlik's Law), should have fallen, but this would have led to the appearance of an unpronounceable combination glass. In such cases, the reduced one was often preserved, violating the main tendency, but providing the opportunity to pronounce the word normally. Thus, the word arose in literary Russian language glass. However, part of the Russian dialects (as well as Ukrainian, Belarusian, Czech, Polish and Slovak languages, where the same process took place) solved this problem in a different way: after the fall of the reduced inconvenient glass simplified to Sklo. The same thing happened with the word glass bottle, however, in this case the process extended to the literary language.
The problem was used at the XL Moscow Traditional Olympiad in Linguistics in 2009.
In the port city, melodic bells are heard every half hour from the harbor and roadstead. Born almost simultaneously, they merge into a short chime and quickly fade away, as if choking, on the wide surface of the bay. On ships and vessels, bottles are being struck. The old tradition lives on.
Yes, now it's just a tradition. And not everyone today will be able to answer the question of what the expression “breaking bottles” means! And some people, perhaps, will be horrified - why did the sailors need to break some bottles every half hour?
Let's lift the curtain of time and take a look at that period in the life of the fleet when beating bells was an urgent necessity on the ship.
In the old days, there were no accurate spring chronometers, and there was no point in installing bulky pendulum clocks on a ship. For a long time, the only reliable mechanism for keeping time at sea was the hourglass. Yes, yes, exactly those primitive glass cones, connected to each other by a narrow neck, inside which fine dry sand was placed. The cones were embedded in a wooden cage and braided with hemp. Loops were attached to the bottoms, from which the watch was hung. They were not afraid of the rocks; even a violent storm could not force them to stop their simple work. It was possible to stop this clock only in one case - by placing it on its side.
Sailors in many countries simply began to call this hourglass the same way they called any glass vessel back then. In Russia they did the same. Flasks appeared in the Russian sailing fleet.
In the centuries-old practice of navigation, it turned out to be most convenient to divide the day into four-hour intervals, which constituted the time of one watch. And this period itself was called a watch. That is why the largest bottle was the four-hour bottle, and the smallest were the minute and half-minute bottles, which were used to measure the speed of the ship using a log. And the half-hour flask became the unit of measurement for the current time on the ship. Therefore, the term flask, in addition to the name of the hourglass, also denoted a half-hour period of time.
Where the flasks were hung, there was always a sentry who monitored the pouring of sand from one flask to another. And at that moment, when the sand was completely poured into the lower flask of the half-hour flask, he turned it over and struck the bell - one short sharp blow. Everyone on the ship knew that half an hour had passed in another four-hour period. After another half hour there were two blows. And so on until the top flask of the four-hour flask became empty. At this moment, the sentry turned over both bottles and struck the bell eight times. The next half hour was marked again with one blow.
A four-hour bottle was turned over six times a day, and a half-hour bottle was turned over forty-eight times. And they rang the bell forty-eight times. These striking of the bell became known as the bell ringing. The expression to beat off the bells (or break the bells) meant to show the current time.
The sailors in the sailing fleet were so accustomed to calculating time with flasks that no one on the ships asked: what time was it? by half past three, then they said: the seventh bell is running out. After the seven bells have struck, the eighth bell is at the beginning. The appearance of spring clocks on ships led to a transition in the designation of time from bells to hours. For example, they say: bells strike, say, twelve (o’clock). ) or three hours."
Admiring the simple design of the hourglass, he noticed everything in it with a sharp sailor's mind and came up with the following joke-riddle for his amusement: Between two bowls, between three bipods, a window got stuck: behind the window crumbs fall upon crumbs, little by little. And here is an even more accurate one: Put him on his feet - he runs; put it on your head and it runs; and hang it on the wall - it runs; and let him run; and hold - he runs; but put it down - it lies" (Dal. Sailors' Leisure).
Something was often left for the guard at the bottles for safekeeping, and this is where the expression “hand over under the bottles” (or under the bottles) came from.
Only once did the general order of the current time display change. At noon, instead of eight bells, and according to other sources, after eight bells, they struck the bell, that is, they rang the bell in a special order.
It must be said that the expression “beat the bell” belongs only to the Russian maritime language. The history of its origin is known (see: Grot Ya. Philological research. T. 2, St. Petersburg, 1885; Uspensky L, A Word about Words). At noon, of course, the bell was rung in the Russian fleet even before this expression appeared. The officer of the watch commanded the sentry standing at the ship's bell, the old English command: Ring the belli (Ring the bell!), and the sailor carried it out.
Over time, this command was redone in the Russian way, the word ring was replaced by a similar-sounding obsolete word rynda, and bell by the word bey. Initially the expression sounded like ryndu bey. And then these words were rearranged. The expression bey (beat) bell was more familiar to the Russian ear. It is noted in V. I. Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary.
They beat the bell on ships and in cases not related to the indication of the current time. For example, at the moment of sunrise; upon leaving the harbor, if everything was fine on the ship; at a time of impending danger. At the end of the last century, they stopped beating the bell.
Today, two time records are kept on ships and ships. Basic daily, twenty-four hour. The maintenance of all logs is associated with it. And the second one is a four-hour watch, with bells ringing every half hour.
If you look closely at the engravings that decorate the title pages of ancient maritime books, you will see on many of them images of things that faithfully served the navigators of the past for hundreds of years and helped turn the art of navigation into a science that is practically accessible to everyone.
Your gaze will first of all stop at the anchor, although it is not too similar to modern ones, and even to that traditional, long-familiar anchor that we are used to seeing on naval buttons and sailor belt buckles. You will also find a scroll of cards here, also not very reminiscent of the ones you started using back in school. You will see a compass card with an intricately painted “Nord” rhumb, and a star globe, and a faceted lot weight, and a sector of a hand log, and a spyglass, and... a strange device that looks like two large bottles connected by their necks and enclosed in a fence from wooden slats. Such a device cannot be found on any ship today, except in the cabin of a devotee of maritime antiquities.
But there was a time when not a single captain would have dared to go on a long voyage without such a device, which served to measure and store time. To put it simply, it was a sea hourglass.
For centuries, sailors dreamed of watches that were comfortable enough, not too heavy, relatively accurate and reliable, until they finally appeared in the 16th century. Clocks have existed since ancient times. Before hourglasses came to ships, people had long been able to measure time. Even the Egyptian priests, thousands of years ago, drew attention to the uniformity of the visible movement of the Sun. They came up with first primitive, and then more advanced sundials, which showed time with an accuracy of one or two minutes. But such watches were not suitable for sailors. Firstly, they worked only during the day, and only in clear weather. Secondly, the sundial was a stationary time indicator, showing, as we say now, only local time, and ships, as we know, do not stand still. Such watches were unsuitable for them.
Later, in the 2nd millennium BC, someone in Rome noticed the uniformity of drops of liquid falling from a leaky vessel. The tenacious human mind immediately seized on this phenomenon, and soon a water clock appeared - a clepsydra. Although their accuracy was not great, it turned out to be sufficient for those times.
However, even water clocks were not suitable for sailors. As soon as the clepsydra was tilted a little, it began to lie shamelessly. During a storm, water splashed out of the vessels and such clocks generally refused to work, but is it conceivable to imagine a ship whose deck does not sway?
When the hourglasses came to the ships, they behaved much more steadily during the motion. They could be closed hermetically, but the readings of such watches did not change. And they suited the sailors quite well at that time. Quite quickly, hourglasses became simply irreplaceable on ships. And yet, after serving for less than 300 years, they retired forever. However... These clumsy watches managed to serve such a great service to sailors that they are still remembered every half hour on the ships of the fleet.
In Russia, the hourglass in the navy came into general use in 1720, when Peter I introduced his Naval Charter. At that time, according to the supply sheet, each ship was assigned a half-hour and a four-hour hourglass. The sharp-tongued sailors very soon dubbed the half-hour clock “flasks.” The four o'clock received a less expressive name.
The same Naval Charter divided the ship's day into six different periods of time, called the German word Wacht - watch. The sailors quickly remade it in the Russian way. It turned out to be a watch. In this form, this word took root in the fleet.
Ship watches were a great innovation: before that, all assignments to work and their duration, as well as rest periods, were made by eye and ultimately depended on the will of the ship's commander. Now he divided his work and rest time, strictly based on the paragraph of the charter and the readings of his watch. If the sailor stood a four-hour watch or worked the allotted time, go and rest. If you have rested for four hours, go back on duty or do ship work. And no bickering, no arguing about who had to work harder. A strict order emerged. And breakfast on time, on time, and lunch, and dinner. In a word, mode! And where there is regime and order, there is discipline. Where there is discipline, the work is done better. This has become an axiom, valid both for past times and for our days. Today it’s hard to even imagine how ships sailed when there were no watches.
It was this German word that gave the four-hour hourglass its nickname. And the flasks and watches settled firmly on the quarterdecks of the ships. It seemed that they would never give up their place and their purpose to anyone. Moreover, at the end of the 18th century (that is, more than two hundred years later than H. Huygens created pendulum clocks), on Russian warships another hourglass was added to the flasks and watches, calculated exactly on the hour.
They all stood important in the designated place, and the entire crew of the ship treated these glass idols with due respect. Of course! After all, on the ship it was a kind of temple of time. The sailor on watch, specially assigned for this purpose, performed sacred acts near the bottles, like a priest-keeper of time.
Probably, our distant ancestors also carefully maintained the flame in the hearth in those days when people already knew how to use fire, but had not yet learned how to make it. At that time, an extinguished fire sometimes meant the death of a tribe.
Staying on a ship without a concept of time does not mean, of course, dying. But this certainly means the loss of the basis of order and, what is even more terrible, the loss of any idea of \u200b\u200bthe longitude at which the ship is located.
In the years in question, many navigators (and not only sailors) already quite clearly understood what geographic latitude and longitude were. Knowing latitude and longitude, people could easily find any point on the map. And they were able to determine latitude quite accurately, even when separated from the shores. For example, in the Northern Hemisphere, it was enough to measure the angle between the North Star and the horizon. In degrees, this angle expressed the latitude of the place. There were other ways to determine latitude that provided sufficient accuracy for safe navigation. But with the determination of longitude things did not go well for a long time.
The best minds of mankind tried to find a way to determine longitude that would satisfy sailors. At the beginning of the 16th century, Galileo Galilei worked to solve this problem. In 1714, the English government announced a huge prize for anyone who could find a way to determine longitude at sea with an accuracy of half a degree. Around the same time, a special Bureau of Longitudes was created in England. But things were moving slowly. And this was all the more annoying because the key to solving the problem had been found a long time ago - an accurate clock! That's all the sailors needed to accurately determine longitude at sea. After all, the Sun completes its apparent motion around the Earth in exactly 24 hours. During this time it travels all 360 degrees of longitude. This means that in one hour the star moves west by 15 degrees. Therefore, knowing the difference between Greenwich time (taken as zero) and local (ship's) time at any point where the ship is located, longitude can be determined by simple calculation. But the trouble was that recognizing this difference was far from easy. It’s easy to find out the ship’s time: you just need to accurately notice the moment when the Sun above the ship reaches its highest point. And Greenwich time, at first glance, is even easier to calculate: before sailing, just set your watch to Greenwich time and do not move the hands. But in those days there were no accurate astronomical clocks (chronometers, as they were later called), and the pocket watches that were already available were very inaccurate: some ran ahead, others lagged behind by an unknown amount, or even stopped altogether. And sailors still preferred to use flasks, without thinking about determining longitude accurate enough for navigation, which required watches with a fraction of a second deviation from true time. It seemed impossible to create such a watch back then. Peter I, for example, equated the attempt to determine the exact longitude of a place with attempts to invent a perpetual motion machine or turn cheap metals into gold, that is, he considered it completely fruitless.
Analyzing the sea voyages of medieval sailors, experts noticed that they sailed, from our point of view, somehow strangely: first they went north or south, and only then, having reached the desired latitude, they turned west or east at right angles and walked, trying to keep to the achieved latitude. This method of sailing required additional time, unnecessary setting of sails, and so on. But still, it was more reliable at sea, since at least one of the coordinates - latitude - the navigator knew exactly. However, such a voyage also did not give complete confidence that the ship would arrive at the desired point. And sometimes this led to funny things. Thus, the Spanish expedition of Mendaña de Neira discovered the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean in 1567-1569. But not a single navigator could later find them, until two centuries later the French expedition of Louis Antoine de Bougainville “discovered” the “disappeared” archipelago again.
Even when relatively accurate marine chronometer clocks appeared, determining the exact longitude remained a very difficult matter. Already in the 19th century, when it was necessary to determine the longitude of the Pulkovo meridian with the greatest possible accuracy (this was necessary for the normal operation of the newly built observatory), the exact time had to be “carried” by ship from Greenwich. An entire expedition was equipped for this purpose. Chronometers were collected from ships of the Russian fleet. There were less than a dozen of them in all of Russia. And when, with the advent of the telegraph, the accepted longitude of the Pulkovo Observatory was checked, it turned out that the longitude was not determined entirely accurately.
But all this happened much later. And at the beginning of the 18th century, under Peter I, at exactly noon, the entire three hourglasses turned over and, so that everyone on the ship knew about it, special strikes were heard on the ship’s bell. From that moment on, the carefully washed, sifted and dried sand in the bottles again began to pour from the upper reservoirs to the lower ones. And the sailor, the keeper of time, warily guarded the moment when their upper tank was emptied. When the last grains of sand fell through the narrow hole between the flasks, he instantly turned the flasks over, and everything started all over again. This operation required the utmost attention and vigilance. Not everyone could be trusted with this. It is not for nothing that in those days there was an expression in the navy “to hand over under a bottle,” which meant “to hand over under reliable guard.”
It was troublesome and expensive to store time on the ship. To do this, it was necessary to maintain special people. According to Peter's decree, the senior man above them was the “flask master”, who was responsible for the proper maintenance of the watch. All these people were not sitting idle. Every half hour one clock had to be turned over, every hour another, and every four hours another. And so that everyone on the ship knew that they were vigilantly and vigilantly monitoring the passage of time, precisely performing all operations, the crew was notified by an audible signal - striking the ship’s bell: “they struck a bottle.” Of course, no one broke the bottles themselves. On the contrary, the sailors cherished their fragile glass watches like the apple of their eyes, especially in a storm. Knowing the harsh conditions of the ocean, they lashed in advance (that is, firmly fastened) all objects that could move out of place and damage the watch. The watches themselves were carefully inserted into special slots lined with soft felt.
The bell into which the bottles were “beaten” was small, 25-50 centimeters high. It appeared on ships much earlier than the flasks. It was believed that the ringing of these bells scared away the evil forces that inhabited the seas and oceans. In addition, already at the dawn of navigation, helmsmen realized that they needed a bell to prevent collisions with other ships. There were no other means of notifying oneself then. Typhons and whistles had not yet been invented; the dim light of the ship's lanterns, filled with oil, was difficult to notice even on a clear night. You won’t be burning a torch all the time, but the bell is always ready for action, and its ringing is difficult to confuse with anything else. It carries far and wide around both day and night, and its sound does not get stuck even in thick fog. It is not surprising that it was the ship’s bell that was adapted to “beat off the bells.”
At half past twelve the bells rang once in one direction. Each hour, one double strike was made on both sides of the bell; for the masters of “beating bells,” this strike was almost continuous. At half past one, one double strike and one single strike were made, and so on until the end of the watch, adding a strike in one direction every half hour. At the end of the watch, four double strikes were struck—eight “bells”—and it all started all over again. A new watch was starting. To step on it and take a watch simultaneously with the last stroke of the four o'clock bell in the fleet has always been considered a sign of good manners and high maritime culture. This is understandable - time on ships has always been valued and respected!
Ship bells are still found today on every warship and on all ships of the merchant fleet. They are cast from a special “bell metal”: an alloy of copper, tin and zinc. The “voice” of the bell depends on the proportion in which they are incorporated into the alloy. In the past, bells turned out to be especially euphonious if silver was added to the alloy from which they were cast. In our practical times, of course, we do without precious metals. Once upon a time, “personal” bells with raised letters of its name and year of construction were cast for each ship. Nowadays, the name of the ship is engraved on the lower edge of the bell along the circumference.
For a long time, ships have treated the bell with respect. And today, like hundreds of years ago, sailors polish ship bells and other copper, as sailors say, to a shine, meaning various parts made of copper. If the bell is kept in order, it is clear that the naval service on this ship is being carried out regularly. Every half hour, the sailor on watch takes up a short tackle attached to the “tongue” of the bell - it is called a bowline bell - and beats the bells. Hearing the ringing of the bell, all crew members will unmistakably know what time it is and whether it’s time for them to get ready for watch. Our Ship's Charter still retains the command: “Break the bottles!” This is a naval tradition!
Nowadays, ships have typhons, whistles, howlers, speakers and megaphones that amplify the human voice many times over. There are radios and other means of warning ships that are dangerously close to each other. But the ship's bell has not lost its original purpose even today. And when somewhere, for example, off the coast of Britain (English Channel), an impenetrable fog suddenly falls on the sea, the officer on watch comes out onto the bridge and gives the command: “Ring the bell”
By the way, it was from this phrase that the name that Russian sailors gave to the ship’s bell came from.
Creating a regular fleet, Peter I began to borrow terms and commands from foreign fleets, and he also borrowed the command: Ring the bell! (“Ring the bell!”). The officers gave this command in English, and the sailors obediently carried it out, without thinking about the meaning of the words, and very soon they remade this foreign command in their own way. “Beat the ryndu!” - they got it in harmony. The team has taken root in the fleet. And since you can beat someone or something, soon the ship’s bell itself began to be called a bell. Strictly speaking, this is not true. In the days of the sailing fleet, a bell was called a special sound of a ship's bell. Every day, when the sun reached its zenith, the ship struck triple strikes three times, notifying the crew that true noon had arrived. This threefold ringing of bells was called the bell. The custom of “beating the bell” has become obsolete, and its name was transferred to the bell, which is still sometimes called the bell.
Having served in the navy for centuries, the ship's bell still serves on military and commercial ships.
Over time, the need to mark the time of noon appeared on the shore, and above all in the capital of the Russian Empire - St. Petersburg.
For a long time it was believed that the noon shot from the wall of the Peter and Paul Fortress was introduced by Peter I, but this is not so. This idea was first born after the death of Peter the Great. The idea was to give residents of St. Petersburg the opportunity to accurately set wall or pocket clocks once a day, and for ordinary people to know that it was noon.
This need arose especially acutely in the second half of the 18th century due to the rapid development of trade and navigation. The chime of the clock from the bell tower of the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul did not reach the outskirts of the expanding city of Petrov, the southern border of which then ran along the Fontanka, and the northern border along Bolshoy Prospekt of Vasilyevsky Island. Professor of astronomy, mathematician Joseph Delisle, who came to St. Petersburg from Paris at the invitation of Peter himself back in 1724 and was appointed director of the astronomical observatory, presented on December 22, 1735 at the next meeting of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences a report on a method of giving a loud sound signal.
Joseph Delisle proposed firing a shot from the Admiralty at a signal from the tower of the Kunstkamera, where the then astronomical observatory was located and there were “good meridians and correct clocks,” but this project was veiled - the bureaucracy in the Russian state was always in force. In the 19th century, on the Pulkovo Heights, the buildings of one of the largest in the world, the Main Russian Observatory, grew up, which was responsible for the tasks of practical astronomy, including the measurement of time.
In 1863, precise Pulkovo time signals began to be transmitted by wire to the central telegraph office, and from there to railway stations throughout the Russian Empire. At the end of 1864, a cable from a special clock located at the Central Telegraph was installed to one of the cannons that stood in the Admiralty yard, and on February 6, 1865, the signal cannon for the first time announced the arrival of noon. The time was strictly adjusted to the astronomical clock of the Pulkovo Observatory. The midday shot from the Admiralty Court rang out every day until September 23, 1873. Then the shipyard ceased to exist here, and the firing position had to be moved to the Naryshkinsky bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress. There, until July 1934, the messenger gun was a reminder of itself every day at exactly noon.
Years flew by, the guns on the bastion were updated, one generation of bombardiers replaced another, but this tradition has been preserved to this day.
Many people believe that it exists only in the city on the Neva, and are deeply mistaken. In Vladivostok, a peaceful shot also rings out from the top of the Tiger Hill at exactly 12:00 local time. It was first heard on August 30, 1889. This tradition continued until the last war. Then the gun was silent for some time. It was decided to restore it on October 10, 1970.
By the way, residents and sailors of the Kronstadt fortress also used to set their watches by the shot of a cannon installed on the shore of the harbor in Petrovsky Park.
To strike noon every day is a tradition that we inherited from the Russian Navy. She should not be forgotten, she should be sacredly honored and remembered.
