About one-fifth of western European cities saw a total eclipse of the sun during medieval times. Those triggered cities were thereafter more likely to build public mechanical clocks early. And building a clock early boosts your population by a quarter across the centuries. This is either freakish statistical mischance, or a truly great thing: Lars Boerner and Battista Severgnini: Time for Growth: "This paper studies the impact of the early adoption of... the public mechanical clock...
...We avoid endogeneity by considering the relationship between the adoption of clocks with two sets of instruments: distance from the first adopters and the appearance of repeated solar eclipses. The latter instrument is motivated by the predecessor technologies of mechanical clocks, astronomic instruments that measured the course of heavenly bodies. We find significant growth rates between 1500 and 1700 in the range of 30 percentage points in early adoptor cities and areas...
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