On this episode of the Dogwatch we visit with horologist, museum curator, and author David Rooney. We have the opportunity to talk with David about how he learned about clocks and watches from his parents, his path to becoming a museum curator at several prestigious institutions in England, and some of the most interesting timekeeping devices he has known. David teaches us not only about specific clocks but also about some of the history of how they have been used in human civilizations and their relationship to people and power. This conversation just begins to touch on the wealth of information and fascinating stories David includes in his recent book About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks.
Today we feature the John Harrison clocks, sometimes simply known as “the Harrisons.” These clocks, labeled H1 to H4, were produced by John Harrison in the early 18th century in response to the Longitude Act of 1714, which offered a huge reward for someone who could devise a reliable method for determining longitude at sea. Despite being trained as a carpenter, he started making clocks at the age of 20, and eventually created four of the most important clocks ever built. These clocks, now housed at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, were under the care of our guest while he was curator there.
Dogwatch 29. Transcript
Michael Canfield:
Hello. This is Michael Canfield, and thank you for joining us today on The Dogwatch. The Dogwatch is an evening shift to earlier late duty or the people who undertake it. This Dogwatch considers the natural world and the things that help us experience it, from dogs to watches and everything in between. Ultimately, it’s a place for us to go wherever curiosity takes us. On this episode of The Dogwatch, we visit with Horologist Museum curator and author David Rooney. We have the opportunity to talk with David about how he learned about watches and clocks from his parents, his path to becoming a Museum curator at several prestigious institutions in England, and some of the most interesting timekeeping devices he has known. David teaches us not only about specific clocks, but also about some of the history of how they have been used in human civilizations and their relationship to people and power. This conversation just begins to touch on the wealth of information and fascinating stories David includes in his recent book About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks. Today, we feature the John Harrison Clocks, sometimes simply known as the Harrisons. These clocks, labeled H One to H four, were produced by John Harrison in the early 18th century in response to the Longitude Act of 1714, which offered a huge reward for someone who could devise a reliable method for determining longitude at sea. Despite being trained as a carpenter, Harrison started making clocks at the age of 20 and eventually created four of the most important clocks ever built. These clocks, now housed at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, were under the care of our guest while he was curator there. And now let’s turn to our conversation with David Rooney.
Michael Canfield:
If I were on a ship. David Rooney is one of those people with whom I’d hope to be posted on A Dogwatch. He not only has an interest in clocks, watches and time that goes back to his early childhood. He did his doctoral thesis on the political history of traffic congestion, which could generate hours of discussion. He is also an inveterate and adventurous traveler. He is author of About Time, A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, and has held prestigious curatorial positions like the Curator of Timekeeping at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich and Curator of Transport and Keeper of Technologies and Engineering at the Science Museum, London. David, thank you so much for joining us today on The Dogwatch.
It’s great to be here, Michael.
So I’m curious. This morning, I guess it’s afternoon for you. How far off of the Prime Meridian do we find you and what is it like there today?
Yeah, it’s mid afternoon here in Greenwich, England, where I live. And I live only less than a mile from the Prime Meridian of the world. It’s about a 20 minute walk from my flat where I’m speaking from across it most days. If I go for a walk to the shops. So it really does feel like living in history around here. Yeah. So I lived in Boston for a long time, and the Freedom Trail, they call it, where they kind of have a red line on the sidewalk throughout the city where you kind of walk, et cetera. Is there any such thing for the Prime Meridian? Is there sort of like a painted line or anything like that? There absolutely is. And when we’re talking about the Prime Meridian, we’re talking about a line that goes from the North Pole to the South Pole. So it’s one of the infinite number of lines, or meridians that connect the north and south poles. So actually, the opportunities to Mark the Prime Meridian are huge. It passes through the courtyards of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which is what defines it. And it’s very much marked as a line there. It’s one of those must visits to have you photograph taken with 1ft in the Eastern Hemisphere and one in the Western Hemisphere. It’s marked in the park that the Observatory sits in. And then actually there are markings on buildings and sidewalks and streets, not just in Greenwich, but down through Africa. It hits land in numerous places, and many places have chosen to market in some way because it’s such a highly significant feature of the modern world. And I think for listeners who are just kind of coming to this, it’s interesting that that line has a geographic reality to it, whereas time zones, etc. Are that we’ve drawn are just arbitrary distinctions. Right. Well, the interesting thing is that all of it is arbitrary. All of it is could have been entirely different. As I say, there’s an infinite number of lines joining the north and south poles, and the selection of one of those lines to be the Prime Meridian for the whole world to be the origin point that you measure all time and space from was a decision made in the 19th century. It was made in Washington, DC, but it could have been any other Meridian. What followed from there was this idea of time zones or standard time zones around the world that reference back to that Primer edition. So an indigent number of hours away from the time at Greenwich. But of course, even that is highly political. And many zones aren’t an integer number of hours. There are fractional time zones. And if you look at any time zone map, you’ll see that the boundaries of those zones are far away from being met. Straight sided boundaries, geography and politics gets in the way. And that’s a theme that I think I wanted to bring out in the book and in my research for a number of years. The idea that the time is political because it’s something which humans have deployed to change the world. Right. And as you say, we chose that particular Meridian which we call the Prime Meridian, which we have lines where you are and you’re crossing, which is an arbitrary distinction. The line is straight because of the geographic aspect. But then you’re saying that also the time zones, when you look at those lines, they’re not straight lines. They’re altered and shifted by politics. And one of the things that I really liked in the book, and for those listeners who haven’t read this or listened to it yet, you absolutely need to it’s a fantastic primer on a range of the influences of time, not just how clocks work, but actually the implications. And one of the things I thought was really interesting was the railroad time that we have, I think, lived in a time where there’s been standard time zones where you’re in a time zone, et cetera. But you bring forward this idea of what the railroads did to this sort of local time. Can you briefly explain that? I think it’s just a fascinating distinction and a point that confirms what you were just saying. Yeah. I mean, the story of the standardization of time is one that always fascinated me. Generally, the story goes that before the railroads came along in, let’s say, the 40s, the time that you would keep in any town or village or Hamlet was the time local to where you were. Of course, that differs as you go east or west. There would be a local timekeeper, probably a Sundial, and that would set the time for where you were. And it didn’t really matter that that time differed from places east or west of you when the fastest that you could travel was probably by a galloping horse. So there was a multiplicity of local times around the world, around any country or area. And what the railroads demanded first and then provided was a standardized time across a geographical area. In the case of Britain, as Railways were being built from London to, let’s say, Bristol in the west of the country, the time would differ at every station stop. So what would that mean? You’d have to change your watch every time you stop to the station, and whose time would you put on the timetables? I mean, it was just fraught with potential confusion, but also lives depended on it, because often several trains would share single track in both directions, and they’d be separated only by time. And if nobody was sure what that time was, then the potential for disaster was huge. So the railroad decided, well, why don’t we just pick one time in the case of Britain, London’s time, because that’s where the headquarters were, and that is the time at every station on our network. Well, of course, that meant that the time differed from the sun, and that might be like 15 minutes in the west of Britain, but in America, of course, the distances are far longer. They said, look, that doesn’t matter because the convenience that this will bring to modern life, it’s worth doing. Now, generally speaking, that’s where the story kind of gets distorted, in my view. In Britain, the story goes that by the 1850s, pretty much all of civil life, as well as Railways, had fallen in with railway time. This Standard Time or London time, which was, in practice, Greenwich time. All of the clocks in every town would be telling Greenwich Time rather than their local time. And the railroads are really significant in that story. But some research that I’ve done a few years ago suggested that it wasn’t inevitable, really, that civil life would fall in with Standard Time. And there were other reasons that came later in the 80s, like moral concerns about drunkenness in the working population or concerns about factory working conditions for young people in the textile Mills in the north of England. That led to standardisation as we know it today. And then that extended that extended to time zones around the world and extended to a single world time selected when the Prime Radian was picked to be Greenwich. Right. And I think one of the things, when you mentioned factories, et cetera, there’s a lot that’s fraught with moving the time around. If you have an eight hour day, for example, or a ten hour workday, if you can extend that and it seems like 10 hours when it’s not or whatever, there’s just a lot of pieces that are difficult. Well, that’s right, because the rise of factories and Mills in the industrial revolution. So like the late 18th century into the 19th century, more and more people started moving to towns and moving to working in factories rather than on the land. And they started working by time rather than by output. So in other words, as you say, you’d work for 8 hours or 10 hours rather than the amount of kind of output that you performed. What that meant was that the clock was the boundary between your life and your bosses control over your life. The clock decided when you started work, when you stopped work. And that meant, as you say, that the incentives for male owners or managers to tamper with the hands of the clock to cheat the workers out of time was a huge incentive. And there were, in fact, clocks that were used throughout the industrial north of England in the 18th and 19th century where the hands didn’t tell real time. The hands were actually geared to the machinery driven by either a steam engine or a water wheel. And if the machines were running slow because the water was running slow that day, people would have to work longer, but they wouldn’t know that they were working longer because the clocks was cheating them. So there’s this real technological reaction to industrialization where clocks played a profound part in how people’s lives were lived. Right. And just to be clear, I said that because I learned it from you. I knew about that relationship because I learned it from what you wrote. And it’s a fascinating thing to we don’t have the experience of not having a clock with us. Right. But if you imagine going to work, I can look at anytime I want at what time it is on the wall, on my phone, on my watch. But it’s kind of a pretty big leap of imagination to think about what it would be like if the only time was that factory clock. And your only reference point was that in the sun, you’d be in a different position of power. Exactly. And this is about power relations. And in fact, many of those factory owners would forbid anybody from bringing a watch to work. Not that many people could afford a watch, but if they could, it would be banned because if you knew the real time, you’d know how you were being cheated. And it’s absolutely about control. It’s about balances of power as an idea that just came through everywhere I looked when I was researching this. The clocks are tools at the disposal of people. Yeah. And that’s one of the, I think, the real insights that I took from the book and the work, especially someone who’s casually interested in horroology and time and like to take up art watches or whatever, but hasn’t thought those things through. It’s like. Oh, right. That makes a lot more sense when you really dig deep into it. I had a quick question before we sort of leave Greenwich. So I have a watch, a Hamilton pocket watch that is one of the military additions that was carried in the Bee bombers. And on the front on the dial, it says GCT, Greenwich civil time. And we, when I was growing up, talked about Greenwich meantime. So there are a lot of different sort of names with Greenwich in it, but we’ve sort of moved away from that, too. We wouldn’t call it Greenwich meantime anymore. Or can you explain kind of what those terms mean and where we are now with using that? Yeah. Greenwich civil time is another way of describing Greenwich meantime, GMT, Greenwich, they’re identical. It’s just an American term. Greenwich meantime meant and still means the meantime on the Meridian of Greenwich. So a line that we’ve already talked about, which is now the Primeridian, the line that passes through the crosshairs of the timeFinding telescope at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, not far from where I’m speaking to you from now, that telescope was used to measure the time very accurately. If you see the same star pass across the crosshairs of your telescope twice, then 24 hours have elapsed the definition of Earth rotation time. Greenwich mean time. The mean means average, because actually the time by the sun, the length of any day, varies very slightly through the year. It’s a repeatable pattern. The length of the day varies. But clocks, mechanical clocks aren’t very good at different length. Days, they’re only very good at every second is the same length. So they kept an average time. The difference between some time and clock time is described by what’s called the equation of time, and you can draw it graphically, and you’d often see these equation of time tables of numbers in 18th century 17th century clocks that you were settling with the sun dial. So Greenwich meantime means simply the average time or the clock time at Greenwich. And it became eventually the de facto standard time for Britain as the 19th century war on started, as we’ve heard, by the Railways and then cemented by other factors, like, as I mentioned, the factories and alcohol, temperance and so on. And it was an 1884 at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, where the Greenwich Meridian was selected as the Prime Meridian of the world, the reference point ultimately for all time and space, although it took several years for it to filter through. And so Greenwich meantime then took on a much wider role in society, in culture. It became the standard time, the zero time for everything. And it kind of still is now. The term Greenwich meantime, or Greenwich civil time, was abandoned only quite recently. Developments in the 1950s, largely in the UK and the US, that led to atomic clocks, clocks more accurate than the rotating Earth, meant that Earth rotation time or astronomical time started to fall out of favor as being the way that nations kept time. And what that meant was they were looking for a kind of a new term to describe what became atomic time. And in the 1960s, and then into the early 1970s, a whole bunch of changes and developments took place, which led to, in the early 70s, the introduction of coordinated Universal Time, UTC being the prime time for the world. Now, it is only ever a maximum of 910 of a second, different from Greenwich meantime, and that is by design, that’s by a treaty, the two timescales are tied together if you’ve ever experienced the insertion of a leap second on December 31 at midnight, if you’re up and partying for New Year’s Eve, and occasionally every year or two or three or four, you might see that there’s an extra second in time, and that’s inserted by the world’s timekeepers to keep UTC coordinate at Universal Time in step with what used to be called GMT. It’s now called Universal Time One or Universal Time Zero. It gets scientifically complex, but effectively the time UTC when you look at an email or a calendar invite which says UTC plus or minus, however many hours your time zones in that UTC is very, very close to Greenwich time. So even a century and a quarter after that conference, Greenwich still plays a role, although the time isn’t measured from here anymore. But the reference line is pretty much still here. Right? And so if I felt sort of nostalgic about GMT, that still exists, right? And I could choose on my watch to set my watch by GMT is that true? You absolutely could. If you set your watch to UTC, then it’s for a mechanical watch and mechanical watches, the tolerances are it’s pretty much the same. If you were writing software for your PC or your computer and you wanted to write a software version, then of course, that nine 10th of a second might matter. But actually, you could write software that showed genuine GMC. So, in other words, Earth rotation time, astronomical time on the Greenwich Meridian, because the difference between that time and UTC is broadcast in all the world’s major radio time signals, like in Britain, it’s MSF. In Europe, it’s probably DCF from Germany, and there’s a couple of WWVB, I think in the States, they broadcast quite a lot of data alongside the time, and one of them is the offset between, effectively, GMT or UT, as it’s now known, and UTC. So you can absolutely. If you’re not starving back Greenwich time and who isn’t, you could definitely write software which showed UTMT. I don’t know if you’re making fun of me or not, but, no, my job when I was the curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory, kind of my job was to remember the heritage of the Greenwich Observatory and what it means, not in any kind of positive, nationalistic kind of way, but just to remember what happened at that place and how the world was changed by that. So I’m hugely interested in anything that keeps a historical focus on that. Yeah, seriously, I think it sounds better, too. It does harken to a particular place and to an idea and to something that you can understand readily. Like there’s this line through Greenwich. Greenwich is a place where there’s history around it. So I like that. And I didn’t know about this telescope. And again, we’ll get back to the Greenwich Observatory in a minute. But you mentioned this telescope that sites a star. Is there a particular star that goes by that you use? Is that actually used now to set GMT or is that just a historical thing? It’s an incredible thing that the telescope still exists. The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, is now part of a National Museum, so it’s a heritage attraction. That telescope, which is massive, is still there. I mean, it’s complete, so it could work, but observing isn’t done through it anymore, but it’s still in exactly the same place. And it defines the Prime Meridian, the Greenwich Prime Meridian. The people who currently find Greenwich Mean time, the Earth rotation time, the astronomical time that we just talked about, and then broadcast its offset from atomic time UTC. They’re not using a single telescope anymore. They’re using a variety of things, like from lunar laser ranging, firing lasers at mirrors placed on the Moon in 1969 by the Apollo astronauts, and then measuring the time it takes for that laser light to come back. That’s one way of measuring the Earth’s position in space. And then there are other radio astronomy, very long baseline, interferometry. Those are ways and others to measure Greenwich Mean Time now. But at the time you ask, was it looking for a particular star? Well, what that telescope is, is its axis is fixed North South. I can’t deviate from that, but it can tilt up and down. And there would be several stars during the night might be known as clock stars. That the Greenwich astronomers before it closed down in the early 20th century. They’d know which stars they wanted to look at every night. They’d know the angle they needed to point the telescope at to have those stars appeared across the crosshairs, and they’d wait and there’d be a clock right by them and an electrical device for kind of measuring the moment that the star crosses the crosshair, the very center of the telescope view. And that would then automatically timestamp that. Right. And then they do that several times every night and they’d build up a picture, therefore, of the time. And that clock by the side of the telescope was then used between successive observations to keep time. So the telescope was finding time, and then the clocks, the mechanical clocks as they were originally, would then keep time. And there was a network of incredible pendulum clocks called regulators around the Royal Observatory. So keeping time, whether that’s sidereal time at star time or solar time, which is slightly different. Some of them would operate the time signals for sending out Telegraph signals or radio signals, but these are all real clocks, many of which are still there on display. So your idea there, which I totally agree with, of having in mind these are real instruments in a real place with a real rememberable, history is really important. You can stand at the Observatory, you can look at that telescope, you can hear the clock still ticking. And you’ll know that the work done in that room, not far from where I am today, where I work for many years, changed the course of human existence and still does. That’s fascinating. And one day I will visit. I have to see that it’s a sort of bucket list, as we say. I think it’s just an amazing Museum to think that you could go there and see that and experience it. So I’m sticking with GMT, to be honest. I know I like the GMT watches. I just think it’s a great historical thing that is basically the same, for all intents and purposes. So one last cleanup question. What’s the difference between the sort of Greenwich mean or the Meridian and the international date Line? That’s a great question. The Prime Meridian, the Greenwich Meridian, is the line that goes from the North Pole to the South Pole through Greenwich, the line that is exactly 180 degrees off from that. In other words, that goes from the north to the South Pole. But the other side of the world is the international deadline and it’s the line where simply the date changes as you step across it, the time stays the same, but the date changes by one. So why wouldn’t you have it both at the same place? I find the discussions reading the discussions at the Ad and 84 Meridian conference. That might sound weird that I’d enjoy reading some diplomatic conference proceedings, but when I read it, it’s utterly, utterly fascinating because all of these kind of scientific discussions are being held in the context of a political diplomatic conference. And it’s that collision between politics, society and science that I find very interesting. If you have the international date line, the line where the date changes in a highly populated area of the Earth, it’s hugely disruptive. If by crossing that line, the date changes by one, Wednesday becomes Thursday, that’s really problematic for how that country operates. So the idea that if there’s a line halfway down England, halfway splitting England into two, and it’s Wednesday in this bit of England and it’s Thursday and that bit of England, that’s a real problem. So the idea was, well, where could we put the international deadline? So it does the least harm, it does the least damage. And when you look at the line, well, when you look at the straight line, that should have been the International date Line, it passes mostly through the Pacific Ocean, and it encounters some island groups in the Pacific, but not the big populous areas of the 19th century world. So one reason why it’s there is because it was out of the way. In fact, in reality, when you look at it, you’ll see that it’s the most convoluted jagged line because political treaties over the years have moved it so that countries or island groups or nations could choose who they are allied with the big land masses to the east or to the west. And so there’s big geopolitics there, whereas having a Meridian passing through populous areas, it didn’t bring that problem. Right. You’re just setting the time there. And all of this was kind of discussed at the time. Well, there’s some people arguing that the Prime Meridian should pass through low populated areas. There was certainly a lot of discussions about which other cities or areas might be the Prime Meridian, but the deadline ended up in the Pacific and there it stays. Yeah. So you’ve convinced me both for your book and this conversation so far that you know a great deal about urology, the history, time keeping, et cetera. I also have to say I appreciate a really good official title, and you may have one of the most fantastic ones I’ve ever seen. I believe you are Liveryman and past steward of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. I just feel like that’s worth saying. And I’m curious about your overall path to becoming such a Liveryman in that company. So how did you become interested in horology and clocks, watches and what was that path like for you. It started at an early age. I can trace it back to when I was eight years old, when my parents decided to have a career change. My father had been a teacher, but he’d always been interested in clocks and clock restoration, clock repair, clock making. And both my parents had always had in their mind the idea of setting up their own business. Many of us do. And in 10. 00, 19. 82, they decided to take the plunge and set up a business as clockmakers. That meant that my dad had to go away for a year to study at then the only crock making College in Britain, which was on the South Coast of England, quite a long way from the northeast of England, where I’m from where I live at the time, which meant he was away for a year and he only came back for a few weekends at that time. So that was kind of quite a jolting experience for me. And when he came back fully trained and set up in business for the next well, the next 25 years, they run that business until I left home at 18 to go to University. Well, of course, I’d help with the business. When it was the weekends or the holidays. I’d accompany my parents when they went to pick up clocks or deliver clocks, having repaired them. And that meant some of the greatest country houses and historic properties and castles, as well as the domestic residences of their clients, some of the most fabulous properties in the northeast of England and in Scotland. I was there as a sort of a nine year old or as a ten year old carrying boxes and helping my dad set up the clocks in beats. He’s trying to set up a pendulum clock. You’ve got to get the tick and the Tock exactly, even? Well, I had a keen ear, so that was one of the things I did. And all of this meant I was absorbing, like the language of clocks and watches because they’d be talking about their work at the dinner table. But also I’d hear about the stories of the clocks they were working on, that they do research to pass on to their clients. And the point was that they could be the most mundane clocks, the cheap 20th century, mass produced clocks. The stories that my parents would find out about them were as interesting and as important to their clients as the stories of a fine 17th century clock from the golden age. And what that told me was it’s the stories of what clocks mean that I care about, and it doesn’t matter what the clock is. Every single clock that’s ever been made has a story, and that story mattered to the people who were on the clocks and that seeped into my life. And I ended up working in museums where my job was to tell stories about objects. And that stayed with me ever since. That’s fantastic. And it really points to finding the human effect of these clocks, the meaning that they gave to people, and not necessarily just the collecting value or condition, which sometimes really takes especially. I noticed that a lot in the watch world. Now you pile on a lot of different aspects of value that are not about the story of the object. Right. Is it rare? Is it not rare, et cetera? Sometimes it is about the story, but a lot of times it’s condition, et cetera. So that’s interesting. You went to University, you did your PhD or doctorate, and then how did you end up at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich? Well, my first degree was actually a science degree. It was in physics. I realized I wasn’t really temperamentally suited to working in science, so I got a job as soon as I left University. I was 21. I got a job as a trainee working at the Science Museum in London. They took on two or three people a year for a two year traineeship fresh out of College. And you’d work around different departments from the ground up. So I was there. I just turned 21, moved to London and absolutely loved it. Absolutely loved it. It was such a varied job. And I stayed at the Science Museum from 95 when I joined until 2004, which gave me an incredible grounding in Museum craft, if you like. As time went on, I was looking to start specializing in a subject, and I’d studied the history of technology in sort of day release while I was working at the Science Museum. And the Science Museum’s collection of clocks and watches is incredible. I mean, it’s one of the finest in Britain, and it has some real treasures. So I was kind of exposed to all of their stories for many years, and putting that together with my history of what my parents had done and were still doing at the time, herology was an obvious choice for me to think about specializing in a job came up at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich to be the curator of time keeping. I mean, how could I not give it a go? What’s better? Yeah, it’s like the home of time in Britain, an even finer collection and an incredible site, a 17th century set of buildings that have changed history. I can’t believe that I did get the job, but I did. And I worked there for five years telling the story of Greenwich and its time and its clocks. I ended up going back to the Science Museum after that, working in the transport and navigation areas, and I went freelancer a couple of years ago. But those five years at Greenwich were extraordinary. It was there that I joined the Worshipful company of pop makers because I wanted to connect even more with the history of the subject. So the Worshipable company that’s a trade Guild set up in London in 1631 by the newly emerging London trade of clockmaking and watchmaking, still going strong for me to be able to join and then become a Liveryman and for a year become a steward to take part in some of the ceremonial aspects of it was wonderful because to feel a direct connection with the clockmakers of 1631 and beyond, many decades before the pendulum clock was invented, was thrilling and still is at that Observatory. Obviously, there’s an incredible collection, as you mentioned. I don’t know much about it other than the Harrisons are there? Right. The John Harrison clocks. And my understanding is that you were kind of in charge of them and wound them and worked on them. I’m curious what that experience was like for you, what you noticed about them being up close. I’m just curious. I’ve only seen them and sort of gawked at them through Davis SoBo’s book, Longitude and Jeremy Irons series and those things which are the popular things. Now I feel like I’m talking to someone who has the inside information, like, what was it like to be in charge of those clocks? Well, can you imagine being given the keys to the glass showcases that those four machines sit inside and being told that they need winding every morning. And we’ve got a team of volunteers and staff who pick some of the days. But Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, that’s your days. I mean, imagine how you feel. These four clocks by John Harrison, made between 1730 and 1759 in response to the longitude problem in Britain, a prize was mounted in 1714 for anyone who could solve the problem of longitude. In other words, EastWest navigation at sea. But there’d been prizes mounted before that in other countries with growing maritime empires, because the longitude problem was the biggest scientific problem on Earth. If you were trying to build an Empire, I mean, we could talk for a very long time about the John Harrison solution, but he worked on a series of timekeepers that could be taken out on voyages. They would keep the time at the home Port. And you can compare that time with the time where you were on your voyage. And the difference between the two times is equivalent to the angular distance between the two places because the Earth rotates uniformly once in 24 hours. So time and longitude time and distance are equivalent. But nobody in the 18th century thought that you could make a clock that was both accurate and robust to cope with the rigors of movement of the hostile salt air, the changes of temperature from the tropics to the poles, all of which people believed, meant you can’t make a mechanical timekeeper that’ll work for months on end and keep time to the accuracy required. Well, John Harrison decided to have a go and spent from 1730 to 1759 making a series of clocks. Well, actually a series of three clocks and then one oversized pocket watch and they sit there today in those showcases at Greenwich. And the first three, that each is the size of a two draw filing cabinet sitting on a tabletop made largely from brass, with the most astonishingly acrobatic balances, balanced bars in two cases, balanced wheels in the third, lazily oscillating backwards and forwards. And my job was to wind them up. They’re astonishing. I mean, some of the technical developments that John Harrison developed, like temperature compensation. So, in other words, the time that a clock keeps changes as the metal expands and contracts with temperature, because the time depends on the length of the time keeping element. Well, if you could make some device that automatically corrects for that change while you’ve solved one of the biggest problems in science. Well, John Harrison did that. The second big problem was lubrication. The oils of the day to deal with sliding friction were organic and they’d come up in weeks. And if you were out on board your ship for months and the oil just dried up, well, he can’t take the clock apart and clean it because he’s lost the time. That is the sole purpose of the clock. So what John Harrison did was to make clocks that didn’t need any lubrication. I mean, that is astonishing. Instead of trying to make better oil, he designed out sliding friction so there’s only rolling friction, which doesn’t need lubrication in the first three clocks, pretty much. So they run entirely dry. They run entirely dry without a drop of oil. So, I mean, you can imagine getting the keys to the Castle. The Fourth Time Keeper was a rabbit change, and it was an oversized pocket watch. So instead of trying to make clocks accurate, instead of trying to make clocks portable, he moved on to trying to make watches accurate. And it was The Fourth Time Keeper that was the solution to the problem and led to not just every marine chronometer that was used from the late 18th century to the arrival of quartz and radio time signals in the 20th century. But actually it led to the kind of the design principles for every mechanical watch since then, not directly, but the idea of kind of stored energy in fairly high frequency balances, the design of the balance and all kinds of design principles in the mechanical watches many of us love to wear owe a debt to John Harrison in the 18th century. Again, I wish we had like a four hour podcast here. You’re very kind, ready to spend time with me. But I think we could go deep on that question right there in the sense that this person, who really was from fairly modest means, he was a Carpenter, I think. Right, yeah. And found a way to do these things, which is absolutely incredible. Again, I have a thousand questions for you. You mentioned that many of us like to wear watch. I just had to add in, do you wear a watch and what kinds of watches do you like to wear? Yeah, I do wear watches. And imagine I’ve got quite a few, and it depends on the mood or what it is. It could be anything from an Apple watch to a Sega mechanical Beta watch for a couple of $100, which is actually one of my favorites. Nice steel, simple. I mean, Sego mechanical watches are really very interesting, but I’ve got an Omega Speedmaster, which is kind of the standard. I was working on an exhibition for the National Maritime Museum on the 50th anniversary of the moon landings. So in 2019, a history of humankind relationship with the moon and a Speedmaster that went up with the astronauts was on display there. And it just gave me the idea I should probably reward myself for reaching the end of this project by getting one of my own. But I’m really interested in quartz timekeeping as well and the history of quartz. I mean, I’ve written about the early history of quartz as well in the 1920s and 30s in Britain. Anybody who dismisses quartz timekeepers is not interesting. I think are missing a trick. The history of that is fascinating. So, yeah, I’ve got pretty Catholic tastes, but I’m definitely not the sort of person who walks around without a watch. I am absolutely reliant on keeping time. Well, that’s interesting. And I agree. I’m a fan of Safeco as well. I find them to be a fascinating group. But also, just when we think about all the things that are available, even at really modest price points, there’s a lot to explore about the history of timekeeping. And it’s neat that you can tie that back to Harrison even. One other quick question, which relates to another guest that I have on the podcast who’s coming up. I don’t know how much you know about what I think are called monumental clocks or clocks that have all those other elements to them the Astral Labor, the movement of stars, et cetera. And then people who come out and March around. There’s a clock called the Angle Clock at the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors here in the States. That is sort of one of those that was built here. I’m curious if you know anything about the history of those. Where did that come from? Like, where did clocks go from telling the time to having all these figurines and processions, et cetera? Great question. We could talk about this for many hours as well. I think there’s two elements to that that I’d want to pick out. The first is the idea of monumental clocks designed to provoke awe and wonder in the people looking at them, which tell us something about our place in the universe. And for those, we can look right back to the earliest days of the invention of what we call the clock, the mechanical gear clock. So back to the 13th and 14th centuries, when they were first developed. Now I think you can point to two different inventions. Back then, there was simple clocks that would mechanize the ringing of bells to help you run a monastery better or civil life to sound the bells to punctuate the day. But at the same time, this whole other type of device was invented, far more complex, which became known as astronomical clocks in places like Strasbourg Cathedral in Prague, on the outside wall of the old town hall, places like Lubeck and around Europe. These highly complex automaton clocks, which showed all kinds of astronomical indications, like the movement of the moon and the stars and the Moon’s phase. And it might have calendar astrolabes that help, you know, the dates for Easter and other movable feasts, but also lots of automaton figures relating to the story of Christianity would come out and move on the hour and so on. Many of these clocks still around, and their role was twofold. It was partly to be a mechanical replica of God’s universe. So if it’s a machine here on Earth which shows the movement of the heavenly bodies in real time, it was a way for the believers to Marvel at God’s creation. But I did another thing as well, which was astrology. It was believed by everybody in the west around about that time that the movement of the heavenly bodies affected the course of events on Earth, broadly speaking, astrology. And so what these clocks also did was help you make sense of your own life. So there were those astronomical automaton clocks from the 14th 15th century onwards, but then we moved to America and those monumental clocks that you’ve mentioned, which, as far as I know, are a post American Civil War story. So between the 1860s and the 1890s or thereabouts, the whole suite of these clocks made in America. One of them was the Engel clock. I write about another one in the book, which is on show at the National Museum of American History, made about 80, 90. And there, as far as I can work out, we’re a way to help America come to terms with its most recent past, the Civil War, by connecting to a deeper past. So often they’ll have scenes from America’s past, from the Revolution, great stories from American history, and again, that sense of awe and wonder for people to feel a sense of pride and a sense of connection to their place in history and the universe. I know we just have a few minutes left. I wanted to ask a question about you and you like to travel. It’s clear what are a couple of the places that you’ve been visited and seen clocks that really made how would they say that affected you? That either surprised or something you didn’t expect or awe. Where have some of those places been for you? I was really fortunate to be able to travel to a few different places in the research for this book and stopped dead in my tracks by what I saw. I mean, just a couple of examples. One is in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, in Europe. I was researching the history of the world’s first stock exchange, which was built in Amsterdam in 1611, so early 17th century, you might consider it as the birth of capitalism, the idea of financial instruments being freely tradable. Originally, it was the shares of the Dutch East India Company, but then quite quickly moved on to the world we live in now, where the financial markets sort of define capitalism in many ways. Researching that stock exchange, a real building in the center of Amsterdam, now long gone. You look at the pictures of it at the time and you see a huge clock tower looming over the whole city. And the purpose of the clock in that tower was to put fixed boundaries on the time in which traders were allowed to trade, in other words, 1 hour per day in the daytime, and then either an hour or half an hour in the evening. And if you were trading outside of those fixed hours, you’d be fined. So the idea was to kind of concentrate traders together at that stock exchange, concentrate them together in time as well as in space, which brings several benefits, one of which is it’s easier for sellers to find buyers and so on. So it makes the market work better. But also, the clock was like a regulator, like a market Inspector. Transactions could be timestamped and so that there could be no ambiguity over when a contract was entered into. And sometimes that was very important. So that clock, the clock that once sounded over the world’s first stock exchange, sounding the birth of capitalism? Well, I mean, it was long gone because the building was brought down maybe 50 years later and rebuilt. But I found some suggestion that the clock itself had survived and it had been moved when the building was rebuilt to a Church elsewhere in Amsterdam, the Easter Kirk or the Eastern Church. And so when some friends and I visited Amsterdam, we went out to that Church. We’d arrange to meet the church’s keeper and a local park expert, and we climbed up staircase after staircase of this really tall Church, and eventually it becomes ladders. And then the ladders get narrower and steeper, and we ended up in the very top loft of this huge Church in Eastern Amsterdam, built in the 17th century. And there in the gloom in the corner, was the original clock from the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. And it wasn’t just being in the presence of that clock, which I might have thought was long gone, that was so arresting. As we kind of looked at it and really carefully inspected it, it became very obvious to us that this clock was out of the ordinary for 1611. It was much finer, it was much heavier. It was made of better materials, better iron, better wrought iron than the clocks from that period you’d expect to see. In Britain, for instance, the raw iron was imported, we assume was imported from Sweden, which was the best iron you could get in the early 17th century. It’s like 2 meters high on this massive wooden trestle. The wheels are heavy. This was designed to impress as well as to work well. It really became apparent to us that that clock in the high tower at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange would have been a site for people to visit, for foreign diplomats visiting Amsterdam. They would have been taken to see that clock and they would have seen something amazing. And there it is. It’s not operating the Church dials anymore. There’s a more modern mechanism doing that, but it’s sitting in the corner, and it survived until the 21st century. So that was one example, another example which you might think isn’t a clock, but I took a very broad view of clocks when I was researching for the book is in the Palazzo Publico, the city hall in Sienna in Italy, which we visited as well. Now, there’s one room in that city hall which has a series of three wall frescoes. So the three of the walls of that room are entirely painted with a painted scene painted in the year 1338. Still there. One of them is quite badly damaged, but the other two are pretty fine. And the reason we’ve gone to see that was it contains the oldest known depiction of a sand glass or an hourglass. Now, we might think of sand glasses or hourglasses, just like kitsch plastic gadgets for timing the cooking of eggs from the 90 and 50s. But as timekeeping technologies, as horror logical technologies invented probably in the 11th or 12th century. So a couple of centuries before mechanical clocks, they have an astonishingly profound history in Western thought, in Western philosophy. We really haven’t got time to go into it. But what I was looking at on that wall fresco, the oldest known depiction of a sand glass from 1338, the Sunglass was in the hands of the virtue of temperance. Now, what the painter was trying to do and what the people commissioning the paintings, the people who ran Sienna in the early 14th century, were trying to do, was try to set out their manifesto, their political manifesto for how a country should be governed. Their argument was for a Republican government by the people in the service of the people, rather than government by oligarchs, the local rich families or nobility. And this fresco, I’m not going to the details of what the symbolism of the Sunglass was. This picture of a clock that I went to look at in Sienna changed the course of political history for centuries and actually changed the way we think about the biggest themes in our lives, life and death, good and evil, right and wrong, the way we think about those kind of virtues or that moral landscape has been hugely affected by the symbolism of the Sunglass since that painting was made. Whether you see the sand glass as a symbol on gravestones, as memento Mori, as now as the symbol of Father Time, the passage of time and its destructive effects, or the symbol of death itself, almost always now with a sand glass in that skeletal hand, the idea that we should live better lives on Earth now because the end will come for us in due course. And for people who feared what would come after our death and who feared the eternity that they would live in the afterlife, the Sunglass was powerful and profound. So you can imagine again, when I walked into that room and I knew the picture from books, but to stand in front of the actual picture, painted in 30 and 38, I mean, it took my breath away. And it seems like you’ve had an opportunity during the research for the book and other things to really experience some of these things and have a personal interaction with them and imagine what it was like, et cetera, which really helps us as readers, et cetera, kind of contextualize time keeping and time in ways that just looking at a picture wouldn’t do, or just looking and saying, having someone say that this is what that means. But having been there right, and in this case, one step removed makes a giant difference. My last question, and again, I really appreciate you spending this time with us on the podcast. And again, I’m only maybe halfway through what I really wanted to ask you about, but what’s next for you? Can you share anything about kind of where your interests are going right now? That’s a really good question. The work that led to this book just opened up so many avenues for research that I didn’t have any chance to include. For the first time around, I was researching in areas that I hadn’t spent a lot of time in periods of history and in places around the world. It’s genuinely a history of many civilizations. It’s not a history of the west. So I was researching in areas like Middle East and East Asia, Central Asia, all kinds of areas whose histories were fairly new to me that it’s just set up in my mind all kinds of research directions. So I’m going to be following many of those up in the years to come because it’s kind of like this universalizing subject hereology. I try to be careful of saying that any particular subject is exceptional just because I’m interested in it. But I genuinely feel and I think many of us feel, don’t we? When you look at time keeping and it’s measurement or horror, it touches every aspect, which is kind of the ultimate point I wanted to make. It touches every aspect of every civilization from the start of human recorded history, because clocks matter. And so I’m glad I found this as a subject to study, but it’s not the only one. I’m exploring a bunch of other possible directions, so watch this space. Well, I’m really excited to see what comes next and we’ll keep tuned for it wherever your interests go. Again, I really appreciate you spending the time with us today and investing some of your knowledge and insight into our understanding of how clocks work and the important not just how clocks work, but how they are important to the human experience, which is something I really took from your book and really appreciate so David, thank you so much for joining us today on The Dogwatch. I figured you enjoyed it. Thanks very much for having me on Michael
Michael Canfield:
thanks again to David for joining us today on The Dogwatch and shedding so much light on how time keeping and horology has had wide ranging effects on the human experience. Don’t forget to write a short review of The Dogwatch on Apple podcasts and to subscribe as it helps us get the word out to others for the podcast. Our music credit today is Whiskey on the Mississippi by Kevin McLaren courtesy of Creative Commons until our next shift, this is Michael Canfield than
Dogwatch 29. Transcript
Michael Canfield:
Hello. This is Michael Canfield, and thank you for joining us today on The Dogwatch. The Dogwatch is an evening shift to earlier late duty or the people who undertake it. This Dogwatch considers the natural world and the things that help us experience it, from dogs to watches and everything in between. Ultimately, it’s a place for us to go wherever curiosity takes us. On this episode of The Dogwatch, we visit with Horologist Museum curator and author David Rooney. We have the opportunity to talk with David about how he learned about watches and clocks from his parents, his path to becoming a Museum curator at several prestigious institutions in England, and some of the most interesting timekeeping devices he has known. David teaches us not only about specific clocks, but also about some of the history of how they have been used in human civilizations and their relationship to people and power. This conversation just begins to touch on the wealth of information and fascinating stories David includes in his recent book About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks. Today, we feature the John Harrison Clocks, sometimes simply known as the Harrisons. These clocks, labeled H One to H four, were produced by John Harrison in the early 18th century in response to the Longitude Act of 1714, which offered a huge reward for someone who could devise a reliable method for determining longitude at sea. Despite being trained as a carpenter, Harrison started making clocks at the age of 20 and eventually created four of the most important clocks ever built. These clocks, now housed at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, were under the care of our guest while he was curator there. And now let’s turn to our conversation with David Rooney.
Michael Canfield:
If I were on a ship. David Rooney is one of those people with whom I’d hope to be posted on A Dogwatch. He not only has an interest in clocks, watches and time that goes back to his early childhood. He did his doctoral thesis on the political history of traffic congestion, which could generate hours of discussion. He is also an inveterate and adventurous traveler. He is author of About Time, A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, and has held prestigious curatorial positions like the Curator of Timekeeping at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich and Curator of Transport and Keeper of Technologies and Engineering at the Science Museum, London. David, thank you so much for joining us today on The Dogwatch.
It’s great to be here, Michael.
So I’m curious. This morning, I guess it’s afternoon for you. How far off of the Prime Meridian do we find you and what is it like there today?
Yeah, it’s mid afternoon here in Greenwich, England, where I live. And I live only less than a mile from the Prime Meridian of the world. It’s about a 20 minute walk from my flat where I’m speaking from across it most days. If I go for a walk to the shops. So it really does feel like living in history around here. Yeah. So I lived in Boston for a long time, and the Freedom Trail, they call it, where they kind of have a red line on the sidewalk throughout the city where you kind of walk, et cetera. Is there any such thing for the Prime Meridian? Is there sort of like a painted line or anything like that? There absolutely is. And when we’re talking about the Prime Meridian, we’re talking about a line that goes from the North Pole to the South Pole. So it’s one of the infinite number of lines, or meridians that connect the north and south poles. So actually, the opportunities to Mark the Prime Meridian are huge. It passes through the courtyards of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which is what defines it. And it’s very much marked as a line there. It’s one of those must visits to have you photograph taken with 1ft in the Eastern Hemisphere and one in the Western Hemisphere. It’s marked in the park that the Observatory sits in. And then actually there are markings on buildings and sidewalks and streets, not just in Greenwich, but down through Africa. It hits land in numerous places, and many places have chosen to market in some way because it’s such a highly significant feature of the modern world. And I think for listeners who are just kind of coming to this, it’s interesting that that line has a geographic reality to it, whereas time zones, etc. Are that we’ve drawn are just arbitrary distinctions. Right. Well, the interesting thing is that all of it is arbitrary. All of it is could have been entirely different. As I say, there’s an infinite number of lines joining the north and south poles, and the selection of one of those lines to be the Prime Meridian for the whole world to be the origin point that you measure all time and space from was a decision made in the 19th century. It was made in Washington, DC, but it could have been any other Meridian. What followed from there was this idea of time zones or standard time zones around the world that reference back to that Primer edition. So an indigent number of hours away from the time at Greenwich. But of course, even that is highly political. And many zones aren’t an integer number of hours. There are fractional time zones. And if you look at any time zone map, you’ll see that the boundaries of those zones are far away from being met. Straight sided boundaries, geography and politics gets in the way. And that’s a theme that I think I wanted to bring out in the book and in my research for a number of years. The idea that the time is political because it’s something which humans have deployed to change the world. Right. And as you say, we chose that particular Meridian which we call the Prime Meridian, which we have lines where you are and you’re crossing, which is an arbitrary distinction. The line is straight because of the geographic aspect. But then you’re saying that also the time zones, when you look at those lines, they’re not straight lines. They’re altered and shifted by politics. And one of the things that I really liked in the book, and for those listeners who haven’t read this or listened to it yet, you absolutely need to it’s a fantastic primer on a range of the influences of time, not just how clocks work, but actually the implications. And one of the things I thought was really interesting was the railroad time that we have, I think, lived in a time where there’s been standard time zones where you’re in a time zone, et cetera. But you bring forward this idea of what the railroads did to this sort of local time. Can you briefly explain that? I think it’s just a fascinating distinction and a point that confirms what you were just saying. Yeah. I mean, the story of the standardization of time is one that always fascinated me. Generally, the story goes that before the railroads came along in, let’s say, the 40s, the time that you would keep in any town or village or Hamlet was the time local to where you were. Of course, that differs as you go east or west. There would be a local timekeeper, probably a Sundial, and that would set the time for where you were. And it didn’t really matter that that time differed from places east or west of you when the fastest that you could travel was probably by a galloping horse. So there was a multiplicity of local times around the world, around any country or area. And what the railroads demanded first and then provided was a standardized time across a geographical area. In the case of Britain, as Railways were being built from London to, let’s say, Bristol in the west of the country, the time would differ at every station stop. So what would that mean? You’d have to change your watch every time you stop to the station, and whose time would you put on the timetables? I mean, it was just fraught with potential confusion, but also lives depended on it, because often several trains would share single track in both directions, and they’d be separated only by time. And if nobody was sure what that time was, then the potential for disaster was huge. So the railroad decided, well, why don’t we just pick one time in the case of Britain, London’s time, because that’s where the headquarters were, and that is the time at every station on our network. Well, of course, that meant that the time differed from the sun, and that might be like 15 minutes in the west of Britain, but in America, of course, the distances are far longer. They said, look, that doesn’t matter because the convenience that this will bring to modern life, it’s worth doing. Now, generally speaking, that’s where the story kind of gets distorted, in my view. In Britain, the story goes that by the 1850s, pretty much all of civil life, as well as Railways, had fallen in with railway time. This Standard Time or London time, which was, in practice, Greenwich time. All of the clocks in every town would be telling Greenwich Time rather than their local time. And the railroads are really significant in that story. But some research that I’ve done a few years ago suggested that it wasn’t inevitable, really, that civil life would fall in with Standard Time. And there were other reasons that came later in the 80s, like moral concerns about drunkenness in the working population or concerns about factory working conditions for young people in the textile Mills in the north of England. That led to standardisation as we know it today. And then that extended that extended to time zones around the world and extended to a single world time selected when the Prime Radian was picked to be Greenwich. Right. And I think one of the things, when you mentioned factories, et cetera, there’s a lot that’s fraught with moving the time around. If you have an eight hour day, for example, or a ten hour workday, if you can extend that and it seems like 10 hours when it’s not or whatever, there’s just a lot of pieces that are difficult. Well, that’s right, because the rise of factories and Mills in the industrial revolution. So like the late 18th century into the 19th century, more and more people started moving to towns and moving to working in factories rather than on the land. And they started working by time rather than by output. So in other words, as you say, you’d work for 8 hours or 10 hours rather than the amount of kind of output that you performed. What that meant was that the clock was the boundary between your life and your bosses control over your life. The clock decided when you started work, when you stopped work. And that meant, as you say, that the incentives for male owners or managers to tamper with the hands of the clock to cheat the workers out of time was a huge incentive. And there were, in fact, clocks that were used throughout the industrial north of England in the 18th and 19th century where the hands didn’t tell real time. The hands were actually geared to the machinery driven by either a steam engine or a water wheel. And if the machines were running slow because the water was running slow that day, people would have to work longer, but they wouldn’t know that they were working longer because the clocks was cheating them. So there’s this real technological reaction to industrialization where clocks played a profound part in how people’s lives were lived. Right. And just to be clear, I said that because I learned it from you. I knew about that relationship because I learned it from what you wrote. And it’s a fascinating thing to we don’t have the experience of not having a clock with us. Right. But if you imagine going to work, I can look at anytime I want at what time it is on the wall, on my phone, on my watch. But it’s kind of a pretty big leap of imagination to think about what it would be like if the only time was that factory clock. And your only reference point was that in the sun, you’d be in a different position of power. Exactly. And this is about power relations. And in fact, many of those factory owners would forbid anybody from bringing a watch to work. Not that many people could afford a watch, but if they could, it would be banned because if you knew the real time, you’d know how you were being cheated. And it’s absolutely about control. It’s about balances of power as an idea that just came through everywhere I looked when I was researching this. The clocks are tools at the disposal of people. Yeah. And that’s one of the, I think, the real insights that I took from the book and the work, especially someone who’s casually interested in horroology and time and like to take up art watches or whatever, but hasn’t thought those things through. It’s like. Oh, right. That makes a lot more sense when you really dig deep into it. I had a quick question before we sort of leave Greenwich. So I have a watch, a Hamilton pocket watch that is one of the military additions that was carried in the Bee bombers. And on the front on the dial, it says GCT, Greenwich civil time. And we, when I was growing up, talked about Greenwich meantime. So there are a lot of different sort of names with Greenwich in it, but we’ve sort of moved away from that, too. We wouldn’t call it Greenwich meantime anymore. Or can you explain kind of what those terms mean and where we are now with using that? Yeah. Greenwich civil time is another way of describing Greenwich meantime, GMT, Greenwich, they’re identical. It’s just an American term. Greenwich meantime meant and still means the meantime on the Meridian of Greenwich. So a line that we’ve already talked about, which is now the Primeridian, the line that passes through the crosshairs of the timeFinding telescope at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, not far from where I’m speaking to you from now, that telescope was used to measure the time very accurately. If you see the same star pass across the crosshairs of your telescope twice, then 24 hours have elapsed the definition of Earth rotation time. Greenwich mean time. The mean means average, because actually the time by the sun, the length of any day, varies very slightly through the year. It’s a repeatable pattern. The length of the day varies. But clocks, mechanical clocks aren’t very good at different length. Days, they’re only very good at every second is the same length. So they kept an average time. The difference between some time and clock time is described by what’s called the equation of time, and you can draw it graphically, and you’d often see these equation of time tables of numbers in 18th century 17th century clocks that you were settling with the sun dial. So Greenwich meantime means simply the average time or the clock time at Greenwich. And it became eventually the de facto standard time for Britain as the 19th century war on started, as we’ve heard, by the Railways and then cemented by other factors, like, as I mentioned, the factories and alcohol, temperance and so on. And it was an 1884 at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, where the Greenwich Meridian was selected as the Prime Meridian of the world, the reference point ultimately for all time and space, although it took several years for it to filter through. And so Greenwich meantime then took on a much wider role in society, in culture. It became the standard time, the zero time for everything. And it kind of still is now. The term Greenwich meantime, or Greenwich civil time, was abandoned only quite recently. Developments in the 1950s, largely in the UK and the US, that led to atomic clocks, clocks more accurate than the rotating Earth, meant that Earth rotation time or astronomical time started to fall out of favor as being the way that nations kept time. And what that meant was they were looking for a kind of a new term to describe what became atomic time. And in the 1960s, and then into the early 1970s, a whole bunch of changes and developments took place, which led to, in the early 70s, the introduction of coordinated Universal Time, UTC being the prime time for the world. Now, it is only ever a maximum of 910 of a second, different from Greenwich meantime, and that is by design, that’s by a treaty, the two timescales are tied together if you’ve ever experienced the insertion of a leap second on December 31 at midnight, if you’re up and partying for New Year’s Eve, and occasionally every year or two or three or four, you might see that there’s an extra second in time, and that’s inserted by the world’s timekeepers to keep UTC coordinate at Universal Time in step with what used to be called GMT. It’s now called Universal Time One or Universal Time Zero. It gets scientifically complex, but effectively the time UTC when you look at an email or a calendar invite which says UTC plus or minus, however many hours your time zones in that UTC is very, very close to Greenwich time. So even a century and a quarter after that conference, Greenwich still plays a role, although the time isn’t measured from here anymore. But the reference line is pretty much still here. Right? And so if I felt sort of nostalgic about GMT, that still exists, right? And I could choose on my watch to set my watch by GMT is that true? You absolutely could. If you set your watch to UTC, then it’s for a mechanical watch and mechanical watches, the tolerances are it’s pretty much the same. If you were writing software for your PC or your computer and you wanted to write a software version, then of course, that nine 10th of a second might matter. But actually, you could write software that showed genuine GMC. So, in other words, Earth rotation time, astronomical time on the Greenwich Meridian, because the difference between that time and UTC is broadcast in all the world’s major radio time signals, like in Britain, it’s MSF. In Europe, it’s probably DCF from Germany, and there’s a couple of WWVB, I think in the States, they broadcast quite a lot of data alongside the time, and one of them is the offset between, effectively, GMT or UT, as it’s now known, and UTC. So you can absolutely. If you’re not starving back Greenwich time and who isn’t, you could definitely write software which showed UTMT. I don’t know if you’re making fun of me or not, but, no, my job when I was the curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory, kind of my job was to remember the heritage of the Greenwich Observatory and what it means, not in any kind of positive, nationalistic kind of way, but just to remember what happened at that place and how the world was changed by that. So I’m hugely interested in anything that keeps a historical focus on that. Yeah, seriously, I think it sounds better, too. It does harken to a particular place and to an idea and to something that you can understand readily. Like there’s this line through Greenwich. Greenwich is a place where there’s history around it. So I like that. And I didn’t know about this telescope. And again, we’ll get back to the Greenwich Observatory in a minute. But you mentioned this telescope that sites a star. Is there a particular star that goes by that you use? Is that actually used now to set GMT or is that just a historical thing? It’s an incredible thing that the telescope still exists. The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, is now part of a National Museum, so it’s a heritage attraction. That telescope, which is massive, is still there. I mean, it’s complete, so it could work, but observing isn’t done through it anymore, but it’s still in exactly the same place. And it defines the Prime Meridian, the Greenwich Prime Meridian. The people who currently find Greenwich Mean time, the Earth rotation time, the astronomical time that we just talked about, and then broadcast its offset from atomic time UTC. They’re not using a single telescope anymore. They’re using a variety of things, like from lunar laser ranging, firing lasers at mirrors placed on the Moon in 1969 by the Apollo astronauts, and then measuring the time it takes for that laser light to come back. That’s one way of measuring the Earth’s position in space. And then there are other radio astronomy, very long baseline, interferometry. Those are ways and others to measure Greenwich Mean Time now. But at the time you ask, was it looking for a particular star? Well, what that telescope is, is its axis is fixed North South. I can’t deviate from that, but it can tilt up and down. And there would be several stars during the night might be known as clock stars. That the Greenwich astronomers before it closed down in the early 20th century. They’d know which stars they wanted to look at every night. They’d know the angle they needed to point the telescope at to have those stars appeared across the crosshairs, and they’d wait and there’d be a clock right by them and an electrical device for kind of measuring the moment that the star crosses the crosshair, the very center of the telescope view. And that would then automatically timestamp that. Right. And then they do that several times every night and they’d build up a picture, therefore, of the time. And that clock by the side of the telescope was then used between successive observations to keep time. So the telescope was finding time, and then the clocks, the mechanical clocks as they were originally, would then keep time. And there was a network of incredible pendulum clocks called regulators around the Royal Observatory. So keeping time, whether that’s sidereal time at star time or solar time, which is slightly different. Some of them would operate the time signals for sending out Telegraph signals or radio signals, but these are all real clocks, many of which are still there on display. So your idea there, which I totally agree with, of having in mind these are real instruments in a real place with a real rememberable, history is really important. You can stand at the Observatory, you can look at that telescope, you can hear the clock still ticking. And you’ll know that the work done in that room, not far from where I am today, where I work for many years, changed the course of human existence and still does. That’s fascinating. And one day I will visit. I have to see that it’s a sort of bucket list, as we say. I think it’s just an amazing Museum to think that you could go there and see that and experience it. So I’m sticking with GMT, to be honest. I know I like the GMT watches. I just think it’s a great historical thing that is basically the same, for all intents and purposes. So one last cleanup question. What’s the difference between the sort of Greenwich mean or the Meridian and the international date Line? That’s a great question. The Prime Meridian, the Greenwich Meridian, is the line that goes from the North Pole to the South Pole through Greenwich, the line that is exactly 180 degrees off from that. In other words, that goes from the north to the South Pole. But the other side of the world is the international deadline and it’s the line where simply the date changes as you step across it, the time stays the same, but the date changes by one. So why wouldn’t you have it both at the same place? I find the discussions reading the discussions at the Ad and 84 Meridian conference. That might sound weird that I’d enjoy reading some diplomatic conference proceedings, but when I read it, it’s utterly, utterly fascinating because all of these kind of scientific discussions are being held in the context of a political diplomatic conference. And it’s that collision between politics, society and science that I find very interesting. If you have the international date line, the line where the date changes in a highly populated area of the Earth, it’s hugely disruptive. If by crossing that line, the date changes by one, Wednesday becomes Thursday, that’s really problematic for how that country operates. So the idea that if there’s a line halfway down England, halfway splitting England into two, and it’s Wednesday in this bit of England and it’s Thursday and that bit of England, that’s a real problem. So the idea was, well, where could we put the international deadline? So it does the least harm, it does the least damage. And when you look at the line, well, when you look at the straight line, that should have been the International date Line, it passes mostly through the Pacific Ocean, and it encounters some island groups in the Pacific, but not the big populous areas of the 19th century world. So one reason why it’s there is because it was out of the way. In fact, in reality, when you look at it, you’ll see that it’s the most convoluted jagged line because political treaties over the years have moved it so that countries or island groups or nations could choose who they are allied with the big land masses to the east or to the west. And so there’s big geopolitics there, whereas having a Meridian passing through populous areas, it didn’t bring that problem. Right. You’re just setting the time there. And all of this was kind of discussed at the time. Well, there’s some people arguing that the Prime Meridian should pass through low populated areas. There was certainly a lot of discussions about which other cities or areas might be the Prime Meridian, but the deadline ended up in the Pacific and there it stays. Yeah. So you’ve convinced me both for your book and this conversation so far that you know a great deal about urology, the history, time keeping, et cetera. I also have to say I appreciate a really good official title, and you may have one of the most fantastic ones I’ve ever seen. I believe you are Liveryman and past steward of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. I just feel like that’s worth saying. And I’m curious about your overall path to becoming such a Liveryman in that company. So how did you become interested in horology and clocks, watches and what was that path like for you. It started at an early age. I can trace it back to when I was eight years old, when my parents decided to have a career change. My father had been a teacher, but he’d always been interested in clocks and clock restoration, clock repair, clock making. And both my parents had always had in their mind the idea of setting up their own business. Many of us do. And in 10. 00, 19. 82, they decided to take the plunge and set up a business as clockmakers. That meant that my dad had to go away for a year to study at then the only crock making College in Britain, which was on the South Coast of England, quite a long way from the northeast of England, where I’m from where I live at the time, which meant he was away for a year and he only came back for a few weekends at that time. So that was kind of quite a jolting experience for me. And when he came back fully trained and set up in business for the next well, the next 25 years, they run that business until I left home at 18 to go to University. Well, of course, I’d help with the business. When it was the weekends or the holidays. I’d accompany my parents when they went to pick up clocks or deliver clocks, having repaired them. And that meant some of the greatest country houses and historic properties and castles, as well as the domestic residences of their clients, some of the most fabulous properties in the northeast of England and in Scotland. I was there as a sort of a nine year old or as a ten year old carrying boxes and helping my dad set up the clocks in beats. He’s trying to set up a pendulum clock. You’ve got to get the tick and the Tock exactly, even? Well, I had a keen ear, so that was one of the things I did. And all of this meant I was absorbing, like the language of clocks and watches because they’d be talking about their work at the dinner table. But also I’d hear about the stories of the clocks they were working on, that they do research to pass on to their clients. And the point was that they could be the most mundane clocks, the cheap 20th century, mass produced clocks. The stories that my parents would find out about them were as interesting and as important to their clients as the stories of a fine 17th century clock from the golden age. And what that told me was it’s the stories of what clocks mean that I care about, and it doesn’t matter what the clock is. Every single clock that’s ever been made has a story, and that story mattered to the people who were on the clocks and that seeped into my life. And I ended up working in museums where my job was to tell stories about objects. And that stayed with me ever since. That’s fantastic. And it really points to finding the human effect of these clocks, the meaning that they gave to people, and not necessarily just the collecting value or condition, which sometimes really takes especially. I noticed that a lot in the watch world. Now you pile on a lot of different aspects of value that are not about the story of the object. Right. Is it rare? Is it not rare, et cetera? Sometimes it is about the story, but a lot of times it’s condition, et cetera. So that’s interesting. You went to University, you did your PhD or doctorate, and then how did you end up at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich? Well, my first degree was actually a science degree. It was in physics. I realized I wasn’t really temperamentally suited to working in science, so I got a job as soon as I left University. I was 21. I got a job as a trainee working at the Science Museum in London. They took on two or three people a year for a two year traineeship fresh out of College. And you’d work around different departments from the ground up. So I was there. I just turned 21, moved to London and absolutely loved it. Absolutely loved it. It was such a varied job. And I stayed at the Science Museum from 95 when I joined until 2004, which gave me an incredible grounding in Museum craft, if you like. As time went on, I was looking to start specializing in a subject, and I’d studied the history of technology in sort of day release while I was working at the Science Museum. And the Science Museum’s collection of clocks and watches is incredible. I mean, it’s one of the finest in Britain, and it has some real treasures. So I was kind of exposed to all of their stories for many years, and putting that together with my history of what my parents had done and were still doing at the time, herology was an obvious choice for me to think about specializing in a job came up at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich to be the curator of time keeping. I mean, how could I not give it a go? What’s better? Yeah, it’s like the home of time in Britain, an even finer collection and an incredible site, a 17th century set of buildings that have changed history. I can’t believe that I did get the job, but I did. And I worked there for five years telling the story of Greenwich and its time and its clocks. I ended up going back to the Science Museum after that, working in the transport and navigation areas, and I went freelancer a couple of years ago. But those five years at Greenwich were extraordinary. It was there that I joined the Worshipful company of pop makers because I wanted to connect even more with the history of the subject. So the Worshipable company that’s a trade Guild set up in London in 1631 by the newly emerging London trade of clockmaking and watchmaking, still going strong for me to be able to join and then become a Liveryman and for a year become a steward to take part in some of the ceremonial aspects of it was wonderful because to feel a direct connection with the clockmakers of 1631 and beyond, many decades before the pendulum clock was invented, was thrilling and still is at that Observatory. Obviously, there’s an incredible collection, as you mentioned. I don’t know much about it other than the Harrisons are there? Right. The John Harrison clocks. And my understanding is that you were kind of in charge of them and wound them and worked on them. I’m curious what that experience was like for you, what you noticed about them being up close. I’m just curious. I’ve only seen them and sort of gawked at them through Davis SoBo’s book, Longitude and Jeremy Irons series and those things which are the popular things. Now I feel like I’m talking to someone who has the inside information, like, what was it like to be in charge of those clocks? Well, can you imagine being given the keys to the glass showcases that those four machines sit inside and being told that they need winding every morning. And we’ve got a team of volunteers and staff who pick some of the days. But Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, that’s your days. I mean, imagine how you feel. These four clocks by John Harrison, made between 1730 and 1759 in response to the longitude problem in Britain, a prize was mounted in 1714 for anyone who could solve the problem of longitude. In other words, EastWest navigation at sea. But there’d been prizes mounted before that in other countries with growing maritime empires, because the longitude problem was the biggest scientific problem on Earth. If you were trying to build an Empire, I mean, we could talk for a very long time about the John Harrison solution, but he worked on a series of timekeepers that could be taken out on voyages. They would keep the time at the home Port. And you can compare that time with the time where you were on your voyage. And the difference between the two times is equivalent to the angular distance between the two places because the Earth rotates uniformly once in 24 hours. So time and longitude time and distance are equivalent. But nobody in the 18th century thought that you could make a clock that was both accurate and robust to cope with the rigors of movement of the hostile salt air, the changes of temperature from the tropics to the poles, all of which people believed, meant you can’t make a mechanical timekeeper that’ll work for months on end and keep time to the accuracy required. Well, John Harrison decided to have a go and spent from 1730 to 1759 making a series of clocks. Well, actually a series of three clocks and then one oversized pocket watch and they sit there today in those showcases at Greenwich. And the first three, that each is the size of a two draw filing cabinet sitting on a tabletop made largely from brass, with the most astonishingly acrobatic balances, balanced bars in two cases, balanced wheels in the third, lazily oscillating backwards and forwards. And my job was to wind them up. They’re astonishing. I mean, some of the technical developments that John Harrison developed, like temperature compensation. So, in other words, the time that a clock keeps changes as the metal expands and contracts with temperature, because the time depends on the length of the time keeping element. Well, if you could make some device that automatically corrects for that change while you’ve solved one of the biggest problems in science. Well, John Harrison did that. The second big problem was lubrication. The oils of the day to deal with sliding friction were organic and they’d come up in weeks. And if you were out on board your ship for months and the oil just dried up, well, he can’t take the clock apart and clean it because he’s lost the time. That is the sole purpose of the clock. So what John Harrison did was to make clocks that didn’t need any lubrication. I mean, that is astonishing. Instead of trying to make better oil, he designed out sliding friction so there’s only rolling friction, which doesn’t need lubrication in the first three clocks, pretty much. So they run entirely dry. They run entirely dry without a drop of oil. So, I mean, you can imagine getting the keys to the Castle. The Fourth Time Keeper was a rabbit change, and it was an oversized pocket watch. So instead of trying to make clocks accurate, instead of trying to make clocks portable, he moved on to trying to make watches accurate. And it was The Fourth Time Keeper that was the solution to the problem and led to not just every marine chronometer that was used from the late 18th century to the arrival of quartz and radio time signals in the 20th century. But actually it led to the kind of the design principles for every mechanical watch since then, not directly, but the idea of kind of stored energy in fairly high frequency balances, the design of the balance and all kinds of design principles in the mechanical watches many of us love to wear owe a debt to John Harrison in the 18th century. Again, I wish we had like a four hour podcast here. You’re very kind, ready to spend time with me. But I think we could go deep on that question right there in the sense that this person, who really was from fairly modest means, he was a Carpenter, I think. Right, yeah. And found a way to do these things, which is absolutely incredible. Again, I have a thousand questions for you. You mentioned that many of us like to wear watch. I just had to add in, do you wear a watch and what kinds of watches do you like to wear? Yeah, I do wear watches. And imagine I’ve got quite a few, and it depends on the mood or what it is. It could be anything from an Apple watch to a Sega mechanical Beta watch for a couple of $100, which is actually one of my favorites. Nice steel, simple. I mean, Sego mechanical watches are really very interesting, but I’ve got an Omega Speedmaster, which is kind of the standard. I was working on an exhibition for the National Maritime Museum on the 50th anniversary of the moon landings. So in 2019, a history of humankind relationship with the moon and a Speedmaster that went up with the astronauts was on display there. And it just gave me the idea I should probably reward myself for reaching the end of this project by getting one of my own. But I’m really interested in quartz timekeeping as well and the history of quartz. I mean, I’ve written about the early history of quartz as well in the 1920s and 30s in Britain. Anybody who dismisses quartz timekeepers is not interesting. I think are missing a trick. The history of that is fascinating. So, yeah, I’ve got pretty Catholic tastes, but I’m definitely not the sort of person who walks around without a watch. I am absolutely reliant on keeping time. Well, that’s interesting. And I agree. I’m a fan of Safeco as well. I find them to be a fascinating group. But also, just when we think about all the things that are available, even at really modest price points, there’s a lot to explore about the history of timekeeping. And it’s neat that you can tie that back to Harrison even. One other quick question, which relates to another guest that I have on the podcast who’s coming up. I don’t know how much you know about what I think are called monumental clocks or clocks that have all those other elements to them the Astral Labor, the movement of stars, et cetera. And then people who come out and March around. There’s a clock called the Angle Clock at the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors here in the States. That is sort of one of those that was built here. I’m curious if you know anything about the history of those. Where did that come from? Like, where did clocks go from telling the time to having all these figurines and processions, et cetera? Great question. We could talk about this for many hours as well. I think there’s two elements to that that I’d want to pick out. The first is the idea of monumental clocks designed to provoke awe and wonder in the people looking at them, which tell us something about our place in the universe. And for those, we can look right back to the earliest days of the invention of what we call the clock, the mechanical gear clock. So back to the 13th and 14th centuries, when they were first developed. Now I think you can point to two different inventions. Back then, there was simple clocks that would mechanize the ringing of bells to help you run a monastery better or civil life to sound the bells to punctuate the day. But at the same time, this whole other type of device was invented, far more complex, which became known as astronomical clocks in places like Strasbourg Cathedral in Prague, on the outside wall of the old town hall, places like Lubeck and around Europe. These highly complex automaton clocks, which showed all kinds of astronomical indications, like the movement of the moon and the stars and the Moon’s phase. And it might have calendar astrolabes that help, you know, the dates for Easter and other movable feasts, but also lots of automaton figures relating to the story of Christianity would come out and move on the hour and so on. Many of these clocks still around, and their role was twofold. It was partly to be a mechanical replica of God’s universe. So if it’s a machine here on Earth which shows the movement of the heavenly bodies in real time, it was a way for the believers to Marvel at God’s creation. But I did another thing as well, which was astrology. It was believed by everybody in the west around about that time that the movement of the heavenly bodies affected the course of events on Earth, broadly speaking, astrology. And so what these clocks also did was help you make sense of your own life. So there were those astronomical automaton clocks from the 14th 15th century onwards, but then we moved to America and those monumental clocks that you’ve mentioned, which, as far as I know, are a post American Civil War story. So between the 1860s and the 1890s or thereabouts, the whole suite of these clocks made in America. One of them was the Engel clock. I write about another one in the book, which is on show at the National Museum of American History, made about 80, 90. And there, as far as I can work out, we’re a way to help America come to terms with its most recent past, the Civil War, by connecting to a deeper past. So often they’ll have scenes from America’s past, from the Revolution, great stories from American history, and again, that sense of awe and wonder for people to feel a sense of pride and a sense of connection to their place in history and the universe. I know we just have a few minutes left. I wanted to ask a question about you and you like to travel. It’s clear what are a couple of the places that you’ve been visited and seen clocks that really made how would they say that affected you? That either surprised or something you didn’t expect or awe. Where have some of those places been for you? I was really fortunate to be able to travel to a few different places in the research for this book and stopped dead in my tracks by what I saw. I mean, just a couple of examples. One is in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, in Europe. I was researching the history of the world’s first stock exchange, which was built in Amsterdam in 1611, so early 17th century, you might consider it as the birth of capitalism, the idea of financial instruments being freely tradable. Originally, it was the shares of the Dutch East India Company, but then quite quickly moved on to the world we live in now, where the financial markets sort of define capitalism in many ways. Researching that stock exchange, a real building in the center of Amsterdam, now long gone. You look at the pictures of it at the time and you see a huge clock tower looming over the whole city. And the purpose of the clock in that tower was to put fixed boundaries on the time in which traders were allowed to trade, in other words, 1 hour per day in the daytime, and then either an hour or half an hour in the evening. And if you were trading outside of those fixed hours, you’d be fined. So the idea was to kind of concentrate traders together at that stock exchange, concentrate them together in time as well as in space, which brings several benefits, one of which is it’s easier for sellers to find buyers and so on. So it makes the market work better. But also, the clock was like a regulator, like a market Inspector. Transactions could be timestamped and so that there could be no ambiguity over when a contract was entered into. And sometimes that was very important. So that clock, the clock that once sounded over the world’s first stock exchange, sounding the birth of capitalism? Well, I mean, it was long gone because the building was brought down maybe 50 years later and rebuilt. But I found some suggestion that the clock itself had survived and it had been moved when the building was rebuilt to a Church elsewhere in Amsterdam, the Easter Kirk or the Eastern Church. And so when some friends and I visited Amsterdam, we went out to that Church. We’d arrange to meet the church’s keeper and a local park expert, and we climbed up staircase after staircase of this really tall Church, and eventually it becomes ladders. And then the ladders get narrower and steeper, and we ended up in the very top loft of this huge Church in Eastern Amsterdam, built in the 17th century. And there in the gloom in the corner, was the original clock from the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. And it wasn’t just being in the presence of that clock, which I might have thought was long gone, that was so arresting. As we kind of looked at it and really carefully inspected it, it became very obvious to us that this clock was out of the ordinary for 1611. It was much finer, it was much heavier. It was made of better materials, better iron, better wrought iron than the clocks from that period you’d expect to see. In Britain, for instance, the raw iron was imported, we assume was imported from Sweden, which was the best iron you could get in the early 17th century. It’s like 2 meters high on this massive wooden trestle. The wheels are heavy. This was designed to impress as well as to work well. It really became apparent to us that that clock in the high tower at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange would have been a site for people to visit, for foreign diplomats visiting Amsterdam. They would have been taken to see that clock and they would have seen something amazing. And there it is. It’s not operating the Church dials anymore. There’s a more modern mechanism doing that, but it’s sitting in the corner, and it survived until the 21st century. So that was one example, another example which you might think isn’t a clock, but I took a very broad view of clocks when I was researching for the book is in the Palazzo Publico, the city hall in Sienna in Italy, which we visited as well. Now, there’s one room in that city hall which has a series of three wall frescoes. So the three of the walls of that room are entirely painted with a painted scene painted in the year 1338. Still there. One of them is quite badly damaged, but the other two are pretty fine. And the reason we’ve gone to see that was it contains the oldest known depiction of a sand glass or an hourglass. Now, we might think of sand glasses or hourglasses, just like kitsch plastic gadgets for timing the cooking of eggs from the 90 and 50s. But as timekeeping technologies, as horror logical technologies invented probably in the 11th or 12th century. So a couple of centuries before mechanical clocks, they have an astonishingly profound history in Western thought, in Western philosophy. We really haven’t got time to go into it. But what I was looking at on that wall fresco, the oldest known depiction of a sand glass from 1338, the Sunglass was in the hands of the virtue of temperance. Now, what the painter was trying to do and what the people commissioning the paintings, the people who ran Sienna in the early 14th century, were trying to do, was try to set out their manifesto, their political manifesto for how a country should be governed. Their argument was for a Republican government by the people in the service of the people, rather than government by oligarchs, the local rich families or nobility. And this fresco, I’m not going to the details of what the symbolism of the Sunglass was. This picture of a clock that I went to look at in Sienna changed the course of political history for centuries and actually changed the way we think about the biggest themes in our lives, life and death, good and evil, right and wrong, the way we think about those kind of virtues or that moral landscape has been hugely affected by the symbolism of the Sunglass since that painting was made. Whether you see the sand glass as a symbol on gravestones, as memento Mori, as now as the symbol of Father Time, the passage of time and its destructive effects, or the symbol of death itself, almost always now with a sand glass in that skeletal hand, the idea that we should live better lives on Earth now because the end will come for us in due course. And for people who feared what would come after our death and who feared the eternity that they would live in the afterlife, the Sunglass was powerful and profound. So you can imagine again, when I walked into that room and I knew the picture from books, but to stand in front of the actual picture, painted in 30 and 38, I mean, it took my breath away. And it seems like you’ve had an opportunity during the research for the book and other things to really experience some of these things and have a personal interaction with them and imagine what it was like, et cetera, which really helps us as readers, et cetera, kind of contextualize time keeping and time in ways that just looking at a picture wouldn’t do, or just looking and saying, having someone say that this is what that means. But having been there right, and in this case, one step removed makes a giant difference. My last question, and again, I really appreciate you spending this time with us on the podcast. And again, I’m only maybe halfway through what I really wanted to ask you about, but what’s next for you? Can you share anything about kind of where your interests are going right now? That’s a really good question. The work that led to this book just opened up so many avenues for research that I didn’t have any chance to include. For the first time around, I was researching in areas that I hadn’t spent a lot of time in periods of history and in places around the world. It’s genuinely a history of many civilizations. It’s not a history of the west. So I was researching in areas like Middle East and East Asia, Central Asia, all kinds of areas whose histories were fairly new to me that it’s just set up in my mind all kinds of research directions. So I’m going to be following many of those up in the years to come because it’s kind of like this universalizing subject hereology. I try to be careful of saying that any particular subject is exceptional just because I’m interested in it. But I genuinely feel and I think many of us feel, don’t we? When you look at time keeping and it’s measurement or horror, it touches every aspect, which is kind of the ultimate point I wanted to make. It touches every aspect of every civilization from the start of human recorded history, because clocks matter. And so I’m glad I found this as a subject to study, but it’s not the only one. I’m exploring a bunch of other possible directions, so watch this space. Well, I’m really excited to see what comes next and we’ll keep tuned for it wherever your interests go. Again, I really appreciate you spending the time with us today and investing some of your knowledge and insight into our understanding of how clocks work and the important not just how clocks work, but how they are important to the human experience, which is something I really took from your book and really appreciate so David, thank you so much for joining us today on The Dogwatch. I figured you enjoyed it. Thanks very much for having me on Michael
Michael Canfield:
thanks again to David for joining us today on The Dogwatch and shedding so much light on how time keeping and horology has had wide ranging effects on the human experience. Don’t forget to write a short review of The Dogwatch on Apple podcasts and to subscribe as it helps us get the word out to others for the podcast. Our music credit today is Whiskey on the Mississippi by Kevin McLaren courtesy of Creative Commons until our next shift, this is Michael Canfield thanking you for joining us on The Dogwatch.
king you for joining us on The Dogwatch.
