And you thought the passage of time had nothing to do with religion...

On a recent trip to Conflans, a charming medieval town close to Albertville (which hosted the Winter Olympic games in 1992) I found myself rivetted to this clock. On first sight, there is nothing extra-ordinary about the clock. But if you observe carefully, you will notice something out of the ordinary in the Roman numbers as we know them, i.e. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII so on and so forth...

The Roman number IV, here, is written as IIII. My curiosity piqued, I set off to get a reasonable explanation, because this could obviously not be a human error. This is what I discovered :

Clocks first started appearing on the walls of churches and thus, the 12 hours marked on the clock were to represent the Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each getting equal importance. If you divide the digits above into 3 groups you get I,II,III / IV,V,VI,VII,VIII / IX,X,XI,XII. Notice how the 2nd group has more digits, thus more importance, i.e. the son gets the maximum importance. Unacceptable, so the church modified the Roman number IV to be written as IIII so each one of the Trinity got equal importance!

Apparently most clocks in medieval towns / churches have this unique characterisitic. Fascinating piece of cultural / historical trivia isn't it?