Dan Snow's History Hit - How Timekeeping Changed the World

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

Accurate timekeeping is at the very root of all of the technological advances in the modern world, but how did it all begin? From Roman sundials to medieval water-clocks, people of all cultures have made and used clocks for thousands of years. Dan speaks to horologist, historian and former curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, David Rooney, about the importance of time, and what clocks can tell us about the history of human civilisation. David’s book, About Time: A History of Civilisation in Twelve Clocks, is out now.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Today we're talking about time. Time has a rather lively history. It's not as simple as you might think. It's not just something that happened to us. We made time. Kind of, we did. I'm talking to horologist and historian David Rooney. I first met David when he was the curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. He and I walked around London talking about a very remarkable woman, Ruth Belleville, the Greenwich Time Lady. She used to go out from Greenwich every day, get the boat up into the city of London, and walk around selling the accurate time. It's handy for people to know what time it was.

So she would check her time every morning in Greenwich. She'd go into town, and she would sell the time. That, my friends, is a career that suffered technological disruption. Yes, it did. Clocks and watches became accurate. And poor old Ruth had to retrain as a programmer, I guess. I'm not sure. David took me through a history of time and how we've sought to control it,

monitor it, make it ever more precise. And why, of course, it matters. Accurate timekeeping is at the very root of all of the technological advances of the modern world. You're not going to believe your ears. If you want to listen to these podcasts without the adverts, or you want to watch the great TV shows that we're producing all the time, I'm currently making two TV shows, History Hit TV, on very different subjects, you can go to historyhit.tv.

Please go and check it out. We've got the world's best history channel there. So just go along to historyhit.tv for a small subscription subscription you get all the audio from these podcasts without any ads on you also get all of the tv shows that we're making as well trust me you can absolutely love it but in the meantime here's the horologist love saying that word david rooney thanks for making the time to listen. David, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Hi there. How long have we been able to tell time accurately with clocks? Well, that's a really good question because we tend to think of clocks as a particular kind of technology, like a set of geared wheels driven by weights with some kind of oscillator.

And you could easily say that we've been measuring time accurately using them since the 17th century when we had pendulum clocks. And that's like the first sort of scientifically precise timekeeping. But what I'm really interested in is broadening our definition of what we mean when we talk about clocks, to move away from really specific technical descriptions and think about any device that people have made to track the passage of time. And then you can go way back. I mean, it depends what you mean by accurate, but certainly useful goes back over three and a half thousand years. I mean, the first clocks were water clocks about over three and a half thousand years ago, and then sundials. And they then developed with quite a lot of accuracy

and precision in the many centuries that led up to what we think of as clocks in the 13th century and onwards. So you talk about useful, and this is always something I think about clocks, like clearly Harrison's chronometer in the 18th century that made the super accurate timekeeping journey across the atlantic in the seven years war that was vital military technology that meant you could calculate your latitude and longitude you could send a fleet with more precision you're less likely to hit rocks you can make journeys safer and faster and more direct essential as important as gps in the 1980s and 90s, right? But in the earliest days, are clocks like an amusing toy or are they really useful? What function are they performing in these

early societies? Again, a really good topic to explore. I mean, we can go back as far as we care to look and what we can see is that these devices were used to order, to provide order in societies. were used to order, to provide order in societies. So going back thousands of years, we can see some really quite modern ideas in the way people talked about sundials or water clocks. There's an example which is a really, really interesting quotation from 2,200 years ago from ancient Rome, when Rome got its first public sundial. It was installed right at the heart of the Roman Forum, and it was mounted on a high column, up high, over the heads of Romans. And you can think of it like a public clock tower. And what the people felt about that felt very modern, which was very soon they started resisting the way that, as they said, that these sundials, these

damned sundials, are hacking and cutting our days so wretchedly into smaller and smaller pieces, and explaining that they weren't allowed to eat anymore when they were hungry. They had to wait until the sundial told them that they were hungry and they were allowed to eat. Now, that feels like it could have been written in the industrial period, in the period of John Harrison and the chronometers in the 18th century or 19th century, but it was written in 260-odd BCE. And was it the man who was benefiting? Because you can make labourers work longer and minimise their breaks and make sure they're so-called on the clock.

Like, is it a useful thing? Is it a top-down innovation that's driving this innovation? I think it is. A lot of it is top-down. People who have power in society tend to use clocks of whatever definition, sundials, water clocks, geared clocks, whatever. They tend to use them to enact control over people, to have power over people. So absolutely, if you look at the industrial period, the idea that the clock was a disciplining device of the workers, that it controlled when you

worked for the mill owner or the farm owner. And throughout history, you can consider them definitely as top-down ordering or disciplining technologies. But it's useful, and it's quite a useful corrective as well, to look at it in the other direction and to see clocks, particularly in the industrial period, as a way for people to get their own time back. So the clock might enslave them, but it would also set them free. In other words, the sounding of the end of the shift

was seen as an unequivocal signal that it was back to their own time. And people have resisted that top-down sense of order and control through history, either by fighting against clocks or fighting using clocks. So I think it is a two-way process. Yeah, I mean, limiting the working week has been one of the great progressive aims since the Industrial Revolution. So time is on their side, like it's anyone who's been through school or worked shift work, you know that when that big hand reaches that certain thing, you can claw that back from the boss. It's great. And a lot of the 19th century concerns about clocks and time were about factory working conditions or mill working conditions. And as you said, using clocks to limit the terrible

lengthy working lives of particularly young people in the mills in Lancashire. Although having said that, the capitalists tended to find a way to subvert that system. And so there were plenty of clocks around in the 19th century, which told the time not according to the pendulum or the rotation of the earth, but were actually connected to the steam engine or to the water wheel driving the machines. And so the hands of that clock would go around at the speed of the machines. And if the machines were running slowly, perhaps the water course was running slowly, people would have to work longer. And they were forbidden from having their own watchers,

so they'd never know that they were being cheated out of time. I thought you were going to say the mill owner was just secretly moving the clock face, because that's what I do with my kids. So on a Saturday and Sunday, or in fact, on New Year's Eve, they think they're staying up till midnight, and we have the big old, the party poppers go at 7.30, then they're in bed, sharpish, having quote unquote, up till midnight. So you know, it's a never ending battle. Before we get to enlightenment, the kind of European explosion of clockmaking. Talk to me about some of the ingenious ones that you've identified in what we might call the ancient world or the medieval world to some of those amazing timekeeping devices. I was particularly taken by thinking about the really exuberant and incredibly

technically adept clocks that came before the clocks that we think of as clocks, as in European geared weight-driven clocks. And clocks in the Islamic world were really extraordinary. I mean, the earliest water clocks, going back thousands of years, were simple devices. They were like the shape of a bucket with a hole at the bottom that water would drip out of, and there'd be a scale marked on the inside of the clock so you could tell the time. But over the centuries and into the Islamic world, some of the automaton clocks that they developed were astonishing. I mean, I tell this story about a clock made in 1206 for the king of Diyarbakir, who had his engineer make a series

of extraordinary devices, one of which was a clock which was twice the height of Diyarbakir, who had his engineer make a series of extraordinary devices, one of which was a clock which was twice the height of a human. And it was this astonishing array of astronomical indications. There was, you know, the night sky pierced with the stars, backlit by oil lamps would rotate at the correct speed through the day. The sun and the moon would pass across the face, if you like, of this clock. The moon itself was a glass globe, which would fill with light from an oil lamp, but the phase of the moon would be correct. In other words, there'd be kind of a rotating shudder as the phase

of the moon changed. And automaton figures would play trumpets and cymbals and birds would flap their wings, right? So this was the year 1206. And this was a clock, it was a mechanical clock, but it was driven by water. And clocks like that, not just in royal palaces, but in mosques, in madrassas, were just these spectacular visions of faith, which 100 or 200 or 300 years later, as the West developed what we think of as clocks, and we started to see astronomical clocks in places like Strasbourg Cathedral and Prague Town Hall, which are still there, although later. Similarly, with these really elaborate, exuberant simulacra of God's perfect universe here on Earth,

and just invoking a sense of awe in the people who crowded to see them. What happens in Europe? Because I've always thought clockmaking... Well, I don't know why I'm telling you this, but question. Does clockmaking prefigure prestige to the Industrial Revolution in some ways? It almost spurs it. Like, I remember that trade mission to China that McCartney went on, the British delegate. And the only thing the Chinese thought were quite cool

that the Brits were able to have made by the 18th century, they did say, you know what, those clocks are all right. Everything else is crap, but the clocks, I can see you've got some clock game. So what happened in Europe? I mean, those clocks for those markets were absolutely extraordinary. But clocks had been developed long before that. I mean, the first, what we think of as mechanical clocks were probably developed in about 1275. So, you know, they're an old technology. And I think what's useful is to consider two different inventions. One was the elaborate astronomical clocks, which were showing the

movements of all the heavenly bodies, and very importantly, were showing astrological indications to help people make sense of their life on Earth. But the other invention, which was technically much simpler, but pervaded European civilizations, was a simple bell ringing device. And the idea that bells, which were kind of an oral signal in society, whether you were in a monastery or whether you were in a city in Italy, let's say, that actually mechanizing the sounding of bells was really significant. the sounding of bells was really significant. And those mechanical bell ringers then spread through Europe. In the 16th and 17th century, some ideas came again from the Christian tradition as the English Puritans started to think about the idea of wasting time and how idleness was a sin and that by wasting time, I mean, Richard Baxter, the theologian and Puritan pastor said, if you're wasting time, you're guilty of robbing God himself. It's him you owe your labours to and idleness is unfaithfulness to God. So the idea of wasting

time, but that came at exactly the time that what we think of as pocket watches had started to be developed so really small not particularly accurate in the early period watches that you could carry about your person kept time with you time was always in your face if you had one of these watches and the Puritans picked up on this and a type of watch known as the Puritan watch developed, which was absolutely stripped of any ornamentation, very austere. The very first watch that the British Museum ever acquired in the 18th century was a Puritan watch, said to have belonged to Cromwell himself, who considered himself a Puritan Moses. And then the industrial period came along. So by that time, clocks and watches had

been around and it's become part of society, an inextricable part. And so it's just religious observance. Culture is one of the reasons that people invested heavily into clocks in the 17th, 18th centuries in Europe. In the early period, the religious context was really important, but also the civil context. The idea that bells sounded in city streets, as well as in monasteries, were really important in bringing a community together and bringing it to order. And what about war? I mean, obviously, we're so used to talking about war being at the root of so much development of the early industrial, early political financial systems in Europe. Were there important battlefield and campaign uses for time?

There are whole categories of horological technology that almost owe their existence to war. One great example is the wristwatch, which the idea of strapping a pocket watch to your wrist, it had been around in the 19th century. Not many people wore them, and they were often associated with kind of active recreation for women, like horse riding or whatever. And it was the South African wars at the turn of the 20th century, and then the First World War in 1914 to 18, where there was military benefit to keeping both hands free if you were timing waves of soldiers, for instance, going over the top. When those wars finished, the image of the wristwatch had been transformed into something which men would wear and which were seen as appropriate for the 20th century. So there's a class which we kind of uncritically wear today, many of us,

which owes its existence or its cultural presence to war. And wherever you look, there are horological practices that relate to war. And one example is daylight saving time, changing the clocks in the spring and in the autumn to make better use of summer daylight. The idea that was first put forward was a moral one, which is about it's morally right to use daylight better. But actually, when the system was first tried in Germany and then very quickly elsewhere, it was because of the war and saving lighting costs for lighting munitions factories.

We're listening to Dan Snow's history. We're talking to Dan Stowe's history. We're talking about time. More after this. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict.

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And another military body mentioned is Harrison's chronometer. You've worked at Greenwich where I met you and filmed with you. If anyone can, you can. Tell me why it's important that ships travelling trans-ocean keep an accurate time. The reason why clocks and watches are absolutely the root of the building of empires is for maritime navigation. And the real problem that had been known since the early days of the building of the European maritime empires in the 15th, 16th century was the longitude problem. It was fairly straightforward to find your latitude, which is your position north or

south of the equator, using shipboard angle measuring devices. But your longitude, which is your east-west position, the solution to it was well known right at the start, but the technical realisation of it seemed impossible in the early days. The idea is that the Earth rotates once in 24 hours, so 360 degrees rotation in 24 hours, so 15 degrees of longitude per hour. So solving this was all about time differences. If you know the time on board your ship, where you are on the ocean, again that's fairly easy to find with angle measuring devices, or the fact that when the sun's at its highest point, that's local noon. If you knew the time at a fixed meridian at the

same instant, let's say Greenwich, then the difference between the two times was exactly equivalent to the distance, the longitude between the two places. And so all you needed on your ship was a means of knowing the time at Greenwich during your voyage. And there were two ways of doing that. John Harrison solved one of them. There were two ways. One was to carry a clock on board your ship set to Greenwich time. That's what John Harrison solved, but it took him a lifetime. And the other was to use the moon and the stars in the sky above, like the hands of a giant celestial clock. It became known as the lunar distance method. And that relied on really sophisticated astronomical charts and calculations and measurements. And it wasn't until, I mean, work and prizes, big money prizes,

had been put forward in the 16th, 17th and then the 18th centuries. For anyone who could solve this, because empires relied on a solution, and it took until about the 1750s, before both problems actually were solved pretty much together, lunar distances, and what became known as chronometers. And then in the decades that followed that, both of them kind of became cheap enough to have on board every ship, and they permeated out into the maritime world. By 1800, you know, the problem was pretty much solved and see what happened to empires in the 19th century expanded hugely. Talk me through the old, is it a myth, clocks and railways, time and railways? It's not a myth that time and railways are a really important story, but they're only a partial

story. And the story is about standardisation, which is a really, really important story in the 19th century, not just for time or railways, but kind of about how the Victorians saw the world and they saw what was good and proper. It's about standardisation of behaviour. The point is, before the railways came along, the time that you kept would be the time local to you, if you're town or village or hamlet or city. And that time would be measured by a sundial, pretty much. I mean, here's the standard story. The railway started to be built in the 1820s, 30s and 40s, really flourishing.

And for safety reasons and for timetabling reasons, it made a lot of sense to pick one standard time to have on all the clocks across your railway network, particularly if they're east-west lines like the Great Western between London and the West. Whose time do you put on your timetable? So the railway is standardised by the 1850s and the story goes that civil life fell into place and followed that lead very quickly afterwards and uncritically. The idea that every clock in every city switched over to railway time, which was effectively Greenwich time by some historians say like 1855. But it wasn't until 1880 that a law was passed in this country saying that Greenwich time was the official legal time for Britain, Dublin time in Ireland. And people have assumed

that was a catching up exercise of what had really been a de facto standardisation for decades. But the more I was looking into this, the more I was thinking this doesn't ring true. The railways are just part of the story. And there were so many episodes where local time was still clearly a thing late in the 19th century. And it was work that I did with a colleague actually on alcohol and temperance and London pubs, which was gruelling to do, but I felt I had to do, which is spend as much time as possible in London pubs to understand the fact that standardisation of time came as much because of the 1870s and 1880s Victorian legislation of drinking up time as it did from the 1830s and 40s of the railways.

In other words, in a liberal society, the government couldn't be seen to be telling people to stop drinking or to drink less. But what they could do was to put up a proxy, a clock, and let the clock tell people to stop drinking. And the idea of licensing hours, 11 o'clock or midnight, that you have to stop drinking, it's a clock telling you to do that to this day. And we seem to uncritically accept. But of course, it was the government behind that who wanted people to drink less. But if you're going to take a publican's license away for serving alcohol after hours, what the hours were had to be absolutely understood and unimpeachable. And that was why I think time was standardizedised in 1880, so that that project was able to be carried through. That's fascinating. Otherwise, if you're in Cornwall,

you're like, actually, you know what, local noon here, we're an hour behind London, so we're gonna keep drinking up. Well, that's extraordinary. Tell me about what very overlooked essential aspect of the modern world does super accurate timings underpin today? Like you're going to tell me the internet would fall apart immediately if it wasn't for unbelievably accurate timing, aren't you? Yeah, the internet would fall apart if it wasn't for unbelievably accurate timekeeping. The thing is, everything would fall apart without this unbelievably accurate timekeeping. I mean, there's not an infrastructure in the modern world that doesn't rely on super accurate timekeeping to coordinate things. I mean, telecoms and electric power supply and water broadcast and other things like the global

financial system and financial trading. And what started to interest me, but almost to terrify me, was how few clocks are kind of leading this project, if you like. Because what we're looking at is clocks in space. We're looking at satellite clocks. The most commonly known system in the UK is GPS, which is the American military global positioning system, been around since the, well, started to be launched in the 1970s, operational by 1995. There's also the Russian system, GLONASS. There's the Chinese military system, BEIDO, and the European system, GALILE. There's the Chinese military system, BEIDOU. And the European system, GALILEO.

So there's about 100 satellites over our heads right now. And all they are is flying clocks. And each one's got three or four super accurate atomic clocks on board, probably the size of a shoebox. And they're beaming their time down to Earth. Now if you're using sat-nav, you're using these time signals travelling at the speed of light. If you can see four different time signals, they're all slightly apart

because the path they've taken has been slightly different. So you can find your position using trilateration. But those clocks are also the clocks that set all the clocks on Earth right pretty much these days. I mean, there are other systems. There's terrestrial radio time systems. There's the PIPs on the BBC, there's the speaking clock on the telephone, but almost everything looks at GPS

or the others. And that means that all of these systems, telecoms and navigation and all these other things rely on those hundred clocks. And the signals coming from those clocks is really, really weak. And it's really easy to jam either through space, weather or deliberately using devices you can buy on the internet cheaply, or even worse to spoof. So it's possible, it's quite straightforward to have people think their GPS is telling them they're somewhere and it's actually somewhere else. There's a group of sailors on some ships in the Russian port of Novosibirsk in 2017, quite recently. And all of a sudden, their sat-nav was showing that there were several miles inland, which must have come as something of a surprise.

And it wasn't a glitch. It was a deliberate spoofing attack. So we're really vulnerable. I mean, I don't mean to be, well, I do mean to be alarmist about this. People are thinking a lot about how vulnerable we are to these clocks because we rely on them. Well, I, for one, I'm thrilled that you've introduced

a whole new sphere for me to feel anxious about in terms of our vulnerabilities in this gigantic, untested, but technologically dependent world that we live in. So thank you so much, David. I really appreciate that. It's great to see you again, man. What's the book called? Everyone go and get it. It's called About Time, A History of Civilization in 12 Clocks. It's been great fun talking to you again, Dan. See you soon, man. Bye-bye. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic. And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it,

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