On the dial, not 12 or 24 hours were highlighted, but 17. The dial rotated in the clock, not the hands. The arrow was a ray of the sun fixed at the top of the clock.
Many foreigners always served at the royal court. One of them, engineer Christopher Galovey, who repeatedly repaired and rebuilt the main clock in the country, said: "Since the Russians do not act like all other people, then what they produced should be arranged accordingly."
Seventeen hours on the dial is explained by the fact that the time in Russia at that time was measured differently than it is now.
Daytime and nighttime hours were taken into account separately.
After dawn, the day began to be counted, and after dusk, the night was counted. At each watch, a watchmaker served, who manually set the clock to the origin at dawn and dusk. And since the maximum number of hours per day occurs only in summer and it does not exceed seventeen, there are seventeen divisions on the dial.
Moreover, on the Spasskaya Tower, the clock had two dials - upper and lower.
The lower one showed the time, and the upper one, as you can see in the picture above, was a calendar, and an astrological one, with horoscope signs.
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During the reign of Peter I, during the transition to everything European, the clock was replaced by the European style.
Moreover, they were installed in the upper compartment of the Spasskaya Tower, where the calendar was, and the lower compartment was laid with bricks.
Modern view of the Spasskaya Tower.
By the way, traces of those ancient times remain in the Russian language.
Until now, we say: "three in the afternoon", "one in the morning", etc. Time, of course, is different, but the expression itself is from those times.
And further. In those days, the time by that clock was measured differently than it is now. Now the hour begins first, at the end of the hour the hand falls on the desired division and we note that such and such an hour has come, the next has begun.
For example - 10 o'clock, this is when the hand is at 10. After the eleventh hour already comes. And when the hand reaches eleven, it's eleven. Everything seems logical.
But it was not so in the old Russian watches.
At first the hour was "announced." Those. with the onset of dawn, the clock rang once, that is, everyone understood that the first hour of the day had begun. When they called twice - 2 pm, etc. With the onset of night, the night hours were indicated in the same way.
And still in the Russian language there is an expression: "what time is it?" Now we understand this in the meaning of "what time is it?", But earlier it meant that the questioner knew what hour was now. It was an hour, because those hours did not measure minutes.
Sometimes we say or hear from others expressions, such as: "It's already six o'clock, and you are at work" or "we are waiting for you for the second hour", or even so, with a mixture of the old and the new "the first hour already - lunch soon."
In these expressions our past is hidden, traces of memories of the old Russian time.