For instance what would someone have said as an instruction to rotate a knob in a clockwise direction? And is there a reason why the direction found by turning the uppermost half of a circle from left to right is called 'clockwise' and not the opposite?
I'll answer the second part of your question first, which might serve to satisfy the first part.
Clock hands move in the direction we know as "clockwise" because that is the same direction the shadow cast by the gnomon on a sundial moves during the day (assuming the sundial is in the northern hemisphere). This is illustrated in this timelapse of a sundial. Here, the camera is facing southeast. As the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the shadow moves across the top of the dial from west to east; a clockwise motion.
Sundials are a very old invention (the earliest known shadow clocks date to 1500 BC), so I can only speculate how someone might have described a clockwise or counterclockwise motion prior to that. But, prior to the invention of the clock, the motion was called "sunwise" in English. The opposite motion was (likewise in English) called "widdershins", a funny little word that comes to us from Middle Low German, meaning "against the way". This is a bit speculative, but I assume "the way" we go against when we turn something widdershins is the way the sun moves.
Hi, FYI you'll find a couple of threads featuring /u/itsallfolklore here