You're Dead to Me - The History of Timekeeping

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr David Rooney and Desiree Burch at the literal beginning of time to explore the history of timekeeping. Covering everything from the origins of timekeeping to time in space, we even learn how you can smell the time! Above all, we finally find out who you can blame for daylight savings and the real reason it was invented.You’re Dead To Me is a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. Research by Rosie Rich Written by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Steve Hankey

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. All day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I am a public historian, author and broadcaster. And I was the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. And today we are winding our watches, ringing the bells and turning back the clocks to learn all about one of my fave subjects, the history of timekeeping. Yes, I am very excited.

And to help me tell my sundials from my stopwatches, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, he's a best-selling author and timekeeping expert, now a research associate at Royal Holloway University, but previously he was curator at both the Science Museum and the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. You may have read his brilliant book about time, A History of Civilisation in 12 Clocks. I absolutely loved it. It's Dr David Rooney. Welcome, David. Hello, Greg. Thanks for that. That's very kind of you.

And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, writer and TV host who hardly needs any introduction on this show. Indeed, she is our all time top scorer on the quiz. You'll have seen her on Live at the Apollo, The Mash Report, Mock the Week and of course, Taskmaster. And you'll definitely remember her from previous appearances on You're Dead to Me. Most recently on the episode about Paul Robeson, it's Desiree Birch. Welcome back, Desiree. Oh, my goodness. I'm so excited to be here, especially because I didn't realize it was timekeeping. I thought it was about time and I thought you were just like, I know Stephen Hawking wrote a book on this, but forget that guy. And what a terrible guest to have on because I am really,

really bad at showing up to anything on time. You were about five minutes late, which I think is absolutely within the realms of politeness. There's no problem there. Sure, but I had intended to be 30 minutes early. So like, that's the range. Now, you know, it's timekeeping and not the physics of time. How do you feel about this subject?

Is this one you have thought about? No, the insides of watches look really cool. I think steampunk is a great aesthetic and that's about what I got on time. So please tell me everything. All right, blank slate. Looking forward to it. So what do you know? So we start as ever with So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, knows about today's subject.

And even if you're not a historian or a philosopher or even a horologist, I think you may know about the concept of time. And you probably have some ideas about how it was measured in the past. I mean, Hollywood loves a close-up shot of an emptying hourglass. It's very dramatic. But in the immortal words of Cher, if I could turn back time, what would they be using in the past? And how did people understand time back then?

Was it the same as how we understand time? Let's find out, shall we? Right, Desiree, I want to start with a very simple question. What is a clock? I'm still distracted by the Cher impression, to be perfectly honest. It was like both incredible and terrible. And now I can't get that weird belt dress out of my head because it's so iconic. It's all I'm going to think about for the entire record. Okay. What is a clock?

Like space is a dimension. So time's a dimension. So it's a way of measuring a dimension in a way that we've all agreed that we're going to adhere to. You know, if I were watching YouTube, I'd be like, time's a conspiracy cooked up by the deep state to keep you down. But like, I don't know, we've all agreed on 60 minutes and 60 seconds and 24 hours. And it's a way of measuring that in like a regular beat that probably has something to do with our hearts. That's an amazing answer, David. That is an absolutely amazing answer. But I mean, the basic question, like what is a clock? Well, the word for a star comes from words that mean bell. So like cloche or glocker or clocker.

There's another really old word, the horologium, and that's what gives us the word horology, which is the study of timekeeping. Now, it's easy to kind of assume that a clock means some kind of mechanical device. Maybe it's got gear wheels, and it's maybe got something that oscillates backwards and forwards that gives it a regular tick. Actually, for thousands of years, humans have needed to mark time, as you say, to measure time, to make sense of the passage of time. It's a universal human activity throughout history. So I think of the word clock to mean any device used by humans

to track the passage of time. OK, so we don't need the tick tock, which is good, because I'm a middle-aged man who can't dance. The other meaning of clock is to hit someone so hard in the face that they just pass out, which maybe goes back to that bell sound. We've already had from you, Desiree, mention of 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. Which civilizations do you think we've inherited that from? Oh, a really ancient one. I'm going to totally screw up and not remember.

The Egyptians, the Sumerians, the like, I have no idea, but something super old. You absolutely nailed it twice there. Egyptians and Sumerians. I mean, it's basically exactly right. I mean, phenomenal. We're talking 4,000 years ago, maybe slightly further back. We're not sure. They were both hot for duodecimal mathematics.

So they're all about the number 12. They find it easy to work with. And that means you've got 12 months in a year, 24 hours in a day. And then you've got 60 minutes in an hour, which again is a duodecimal number. We're still using this duodecimal mathematics that was around in the Bronze Age. But it's not a totally unbroken line. Because in 1793, the French Revolutionary Government, they had a crack at a whole new time system.

What was it, Desiree? They were like, oh, I pay attention to time. There's café and du pain, du fromage et d'amour. And yes, time was based on when I feel like doing it, it's going to get done. Or if not, it's going to look good. Close? So you're just saying sort of pure vibes. I mean, like straight up vibes.

I love that. David, they went very much the opposite of vibes. They went for a sort of rigid, new, scientific, rationalist, enlightenment approach to time. They had this big metric measurement project to redefine all measurements into this new system based on nature. And as part of that, they introduced metric time, which meant decimal time. So that was the number 10 rather than the numbers 12 or 60.

So the idea of decimal time wasn't entirely new. There'd been decimal time systems in medieval China and in other places. Actually, the idea of decimal time was also put forward in England by an astronomer in 1769, the astronomer William Emerson, who was from Darlington in County Durham. But he didn't think that decimal time would catch on because he thought what he called the tyranny of custom would never let go of that old system of 12 and 60. But the French thought a few decades later that they could grasp time from that tyranny of custom. So in the French system, you'd have a day lasting 10 hours and each hour would last 100 minutes and each minute was 100 seconds. Did that still work out or did the sun keep rising at different times?

The period of a day is a natural cycle, a rotation of the earth. But how we divide that up is absolutely human made. So they also decided to redraft the calendar, which was a hugely revolutionary act. So it had 10 days in a week. So imagine a 10 day week. Imagine how popular.

There's already too many now. And then there'd be three 10 day weeks in a month. And then there'd be 10 months in the year. And the months they gave them all of these new names that were based on cycles of weather and agriculture. So like February was Ventos, the windy month. agriculture so like february was ventos the windy month and i mean part of that was because they really wanted to get the support of of agricultural workers the working classes for that new scheme to try and convince them further you could also get hybrid clocks and watches a few of them have still survived which showed both 24 hours and 10 hours on the same dial. But I think it's fair to say decimal time was hugely unpopular

because it was a massive pain to try to implement it. So it only lasted decimal time 18 months. Or was it 15 months? It's hard to tell. Before it got ditched. Yeah. It was a literal waste of time, Desiree. But if you had to rename January, what would you call it?

Well, January is easy. January is called my birthday. Don't forget it. Because everyone does if you're born in January. Everybody's like, is your birthday in February? I'm like, no, that's when I celebrate it because you dicks can't remember that it's in January. Okay. Well, I mean, in terms of the technology of timekeeping,

the earliest technology we've got evidence for is in the Bronze Age. Well, I mean, in terms of the technology of timekeeping, the earliest technology we've got evidence for is in the Bronze Age. We're talking Egypt here. We're talking sundials and shadow clocks. We can actually show you a very early one from 3,500 years ago. It would have had a gnomon, which is the little pointy triangular bit that puts the shadow of the sun on it. And you can see the equally partitioned lines in a semicircle there. So it's pretty straightforward. I mean, it's great as a human that we call anything we make

technology. Like if it does one thing, it's technology. Like, I don't know, is a cat technology like anything that does anything? When you think of technology, you're not thinking of what I'm looking at right now. This looks like some kind of fossil of a shell. But I mean, it's cool. I don't see the little actual dial on that, but it's kind of got like a scale measure. And I'm assuming you see a shadow in one place and then the shadows moved. And that's pretty much all you need to know about time. They had things called shadow clocks, which would have to face east in the morning.

And then at noon, the sun would be above it. and then you'd have to turn it around. Bad technology. Where's ye old Steve Jobs or whoever? And then at noon, you got to turn it. Otherwise, you have no idea. Like if you're late for that, you just get there and go like, it's noon now. It's just noon now. I decided it's noon now. So sundials are, they're a big deal in the ancient world. There's quite a famous time heist, I'm going to call it. The Romans show up in Sicily and they nick a sundial with a gnomon and they're very proud, aren't they? They were super proud of it. So we're going back in time nearly 2,300 years to the first Punic war between the Roman Republic and Carthage. So the year was 263 BCE, and the Romans captured that Greek island colony of Catania on the island of Sicily. So as well as plundering treasure, they also took something that felt quite mundane, perhaps, which was the local sundial. And they

brought it back to Rome, and they set it up on a tall column right at the heart of the Roman Forum. Now, of course, it was calibrated for the time and the calendar of Sicily, which was slightly different from that of Rome. It didn't seem to matter because it was in use in Rome for almost a century. And the point is that that was Rome's first public sundial. It was its first clock tower. The Romans became obsessed by these things. They started popping up all across the Republic and you could not get away from these things.

Did they have to have a guy up there really high to go ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong every hour? Or did that come later? Yes! Just, I mean, not the worst job except for you're like there in the sun all day. So Desiree, imagine you're like there in the sun all day. So Desiree, imagine you're in ancient Rome.

Are you happy? Are you excited for this new technology? No, no, I'm not. No person is ever excited for any technology, especially when you're like, ah, all these kids with all their sun dials skating in, being like, it's this o'clock. It's that o'clock. Don't tell me what time it is. I was here when we had to walk up time both ways.

Like, no, they weren't happy. You're absolutely right, David. There's some seriously grumpy texts we have from this period. That's almost literally word for word for what was being said at the time. Desiree just spat out her drink, by the way. Oh my God, it's a mess. Uno momento, port favor. though oh my god it's a mess so there's this incredible line written in a play that was written at the time that those sundials were spreading all over rome and there's this one character in this play said this. May the gods damn that man who first discovered the hours and who first set up a sundial here to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces.

You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial. It used to warn me to eat. But now what there is isn't eaten unless the sun says so. Wow, that's pretty epic. And also timeless. Like you could throw that into a play now and I'd be like, yeah, wow, he's got some good ideas. It's one of those memes your uncle shares on Facebook saying, when I was a lad, we didn't have mobile phones.

Two bits a can, bit of string. It's a sort of rant. It's a rant about kids and their new technology. It's great. But also he was the first person to express that. How many people do you know who are like, I can't keep up with all of the... And like he was the first person to say that.

And this was 2,300 years ago. And it shows just how embedded in our lives the power of clocks keeping us in order is. Yeah, they were the first police. Creepy. I used to think time was all right, but mm-mm. No, no. I'm on to you.

Yeah, and that playwright is Plautus. And he's not the only one. We have other evidence as well of people being grumpy about time, but that's the best one. Okay, so that brings us on to my favourite fact about time of all facts. So the Romans, Desiree, would bisect their day into two sets of 12 hours. So they've got 12 hours of night and theyect their day into two sets of 12 hours. So they've got 12 hours of night and they've got 12 hours of daylight. Very straightforward.

Except for one slightly awkward thing. How long is a Roman hour? Oh, come on. They do this stupid too? Wait, I'm going to guess something annoying like 53 minutes. That's a good guess. But it depends on the month. Sundials measure sun and sunlight fluctuates through the year. There's more in the summer, there's less in the winter. So 12 hours would stretch and you'd have 75 minute hours in the summer, maybe 45 minute hours in the winter. That must have made a real complicated 20 days have September, April, June and November kind of song to remind them of how long an hour was depending on what day. And presumably that guy was furious about his lunch. He was hungry. He wanted his lunch.

It was a 75 minute hour. He's like, oh, God damn, time is a movable feast. It literally stretches and shrinks in the ancient world. And one of the people who helps to solve this is an Islamic scholar called Ibn al-Shatir, who doesn't show up until the late 1300s, David. Yeah, so we're in 14th century Damascus in Syria, probably about the 1370s. And the official timekeeper of the Umayyad Mosque, the great mosque of Damascus, was, as you say, the astronomer Ibn al-Shatir. And the thing that he probably became most famous for was a sundial that scholars tend to think was probably the most sophisticated that had ever been made up to that point. It was a fixed sundial, fixed high up in the mosque,

and it had three individual dials inscribed in it. One of them measured hours since sunset, another one measured hours until sunset, but it also could measure what were called equal hours, where it was the whole day and night period was divided equally, no matter what the season. So that's the system that we use today, where each hour is the same length as every other hour. And this might all sound really arcane, and it kind of is, but actually it was really significant.

And often it came down to the needs of astronomers who wanted equal hours, and they were often very powerful in society, compared with the needs of the ordinary citizens going about their daily lives according to the sun, daylight, and darkness, who wanted often unequal hours. So usually what happened for centuries was that the two systems would run side by side. And you could imagine how complicated that made life. Yeah. I mean, how complicated did it make that sentence? Like, I'm still trying to visualize. Okay. So hours since sunset, hours until sunset, and then the regular clock that we know today. Because when you said that, I was just thinking of the days since last accident calendar.

But essentially, astronomers, you're saying, wanted the 24-hour time because obviously they want their math problems to work out. So they want something that's even all the time. And the people wanted subjectivity because some hours are longer than other hours. The thing is, we've got to think about what people were using time for. So the astronomers wanted equal hours because they're involved in looking out to the stars. So they're not interested in daylight and darkness, they're interested much further out. But if your faith had prayer times, which were based on sunset or sunrise, and those vary throughout the year, according to where you are on earth, then those

unequal hours are related to daylight and darkness periods is super important. And those are the patterns that are important to you. And so I guess this just reminds us that there is no universal time system. It's all made up by humans to serve purposes on earth. Yeah. And so we've got the Amayad Mosque there. That's an extraordinary building. Another building doing a timekeeping function was in ancient Athens. And this had a lovely name, this building. It's called the Tower of the Winds, which is great. It's very sort of Lord of the Rings.

It's such an important building. It's also known in Greek as the Horologion. It's in Athens. It's incredibly well preserved to this day. Originally, it was beautifully, colourfully decorated. So what it is, it's an octagonal marble tower, about 14 metres high, eight metres across, near the famous Acropolis, believed to have been built in about 140 BCE. It was part sundial, part wind vane, hence Tower of the Winds,

but its third thing, it was also part klepsydra. And Desiree, what's a klepsydra? I mean, it's not a sexually transmitted infection, so what else is it? Is it a thing that tells you the best time to steal stuff from other people in the middle of the night? From klepto, nice. Good guessing. It means time stealer. Yeah, exactly that. Wow, how did it steal the time then?

Just lifting watches in the metro? No, it's actually a water clock. And this is another hugely important technology in the ancient world. They're an even older timekeeping technology than sundials, probably. And what a water clock does is it tracks time by regulating the flow of water from one vessel to another. Now at their simplest it would be a bucket-shaped vessel with a hole at the bottom and time scales marked on the inside. Now we're talking just now about equal and unequal hours. While water clocks naturally kept equal hours, the water flowed at a steady rate. They also had the benefit of working at night which was important

for prayer. Now they weren't just used in the ancient Med. If you were in ancient imperial China or medieval Japan, every major city would have had a klepsydra in a tall tower fitted with drums or bells from which the time would be sounded to us, the public. Some water clocks were absolutely spectacular, and this was centuries before the invention of the European mechanical clock. Klepsodra work at night, which is very handy. So there's all these ancient technologies, very impressive. And then the other technology we haven't talked about in terms of telling the time is with your nose. Desiree, how would you smell

time? I mean, if I smell food, I know it's dinner time. In the morning, if I smell my cat coming in, I know it's morning. That's all I got. I have no idea how you would smell time beyond food or like maybe the crispness of the air or some kind of thing if you were really well-versed in paying attention to anything on this planet. I mean, these are lovely answers, but we're talking about a proper gadget here, a device. These are called fire clocks. They were used in medieval China. It's sniff the time tech, isn't it? Yeah, these are really amazing, actually. It's like smell-o-vision for time.

Yeah. So, I mean, fire clocks could mean candles or oil lamps being used to measure time. So you could watch a candle burning down and you could mark a scale on the side of it. I don't need my nose to watch a candle. This is some book science. What? But the other type of fire clock, which was indeed medieval China, also Japan and Korea, where you'd measure time by smell by using incense. A really subtle sensory clock, because you could use different incenses at different times of the day. And so you could literally walk into a room and you would know what the time was just from the smell. Yeah. See, I was about to say, I was like, if you just had different scents, I would know if it changed from like Nag Champa into cinnamon rolls that it was morning. Cinnamon

rolls or bacon, both of those things will get people out of bed. And that's really all you need a clock for. Smell is a really good set of time cues for societies that are trying to make sense of time. I mean, we always look for high tech gadgets from the past, but we shouldn't ever forget the natural ones as well. David, you mentioned the natural world giving us timekeeping gadgets of a sort. I mean, the classic question I have to ask you now, Desiree, I don't know if I'm going to regret this, but is a cock a clock? No, because roosters lie. Roosters, I have been to Puerto Rico and roosters just sound off whenever the hell they feel like it.

That is a joke, all right? They'll do it at five in the morning. They'll do it at 11. They'll do it at 2.30. They don't give a damn. So that's them all, blah. David, Desiree's not convinced. Yeah, I mean, when we look back in history,

we absolutely have to argue that a cock is a clock. If you look in the medieval European literature, references to cockcrow pre-dawn, the references, far outnumber references, for instance, to water clocks, particularly when it came to prayer times that were before dawn, the rooster was absolutely part of your toolkit. I just think it reminds us, like from a historical point of view, that if we want to understand the past on its own terms, we should put aside our preconceptions and we need to

understand what people at the time needed. And it seems that medieval people needed a cock to get them up in the morning. I mean, should we all just walk around that as though it's like a wet floor sign and just I mean, and the other thing that I suppose would be measuring time in the medieval world is the iconic thing I've mentioned in the introduction, the hourglass. Are they medieval, David? Are they older? And also, they've got a really interesting artistic heritage too, haven't they? We don't really know when the hourglass was invented. Some people argue for ancient Greece, but it seems more likely they were around about the 11th or the 12th century, either by Islamic or European makers.

And they're called hourglasses because they would sometimes run for an hour, whatever an hour is, but most of them would actually run for either longer or shorter periods. It could be anything from like 24 hours down to a few seconds. But it really is, as you say, Greg, it's the symbolism that's fascinating here. So like from the 14th century onwards, the hourglass came to symbolize virtue, how to live a good life on earth to ensure a better eternity for you. Then it started to symbolise the passage of time itself, particularly time's destructive effect. So you had that figure of father time, an old man with wings and a beard carrying an hourglass. That was from the 15th century. And that became widespread in European art and culture. And then from the 16th century, things got a little bit darker.

And the grinning skeletal figure of death with an hourglass clutched in his outstretched hand as he beckoned us to our graves became that cautionary symbol of mortality on tombs and gravestones across Europe. It had this message. It was memento mori. Remember that you must die. And so we're in the medieval world and this is where we get our mechanical clocks, our clocker, our bells. And they're called that because they're housed in whacking great bell towers, David, aren't they? And the technology is sophisticated, but also not sophisticated. It's gravity. It's quite simple. You got it in many respects. Absolutely. So mechanical clocks, as we think of them, first made in Europe in probably about the year 1275.

The whole point of them was to mechanise something that already took place, which was ringing bells from tall towers. Intermission geared wheels powered by gravity, which was ringing bells from tall towers. Intermission-geared wheels powered by gravity, the wheels would rotate at a near constant speed. Actually, the first clocks wouldn't have a visual dial or a clock face at all. All they did was ring the bells. It was only later that a visual clock face was added,

and they'd only have an hour hand, and then later a minute hand was added as clocks got more accurate. First ones weren't that accurate, didn't really matter, because they'd need to be wound up probably every day so they could be reset at the same time using a sundial. Now the oldest one is an incredible one. I've been up this tower in Chioggia near Venice. The oldest surviving mechanical clock from 1386. There's another one from that year slightly later in Salisbury Cathedral. And I think what they were trying to do, these tall public clocks ringing bells,

was to project political power by forcing this sense of order, temporal order, onto the population of towns and cities. Is that why public leaders are so cocky? Because we've talked about the cock being sort of the introduction of sound waking us up. And then all of our clocks were like, bong, bong, bong. And then they're like, we're reinforcing order. And it's like, you're just a big frigging rooster. That's it. Absolutely spot on. So there's another type of mechanical clock at the same time as these fairly simple bell ringers, which was astronomical clocks, which were hugely complicated. Places like Prague or Strasbourg Cathedral. And the Strasbourg Cathedral clock had a gigantic automaton rooster right at the top.

It's shouting down at the people saying, you are being kept in order by this machine, which represents either God or the universe or your political leaders. And then we've also got this sort of other question going on, David, of the idea of time is money, mercantilism, trade, business. You know, certainly in the 13th century, we get that first clock in Italy showing up. We see a real boom time in commerce. And so time is money. I'll ask you this now actually Desiree, do you know how old that phrase is? I mean, from the sound of what you're about to set up, like it sounds like it's quite old indeed. It's not medieval. Okay. Cause I was like, didn't like Michael Douglas say that in that money movie in the eighties and like that was

when it started. The earliest source I've got is for 1719. Time is money. Oh, okay. We know Benjamin Franklin uses that phrase in 1748, and he's really interested in time. I mean, what phrase doesn't he use? All he did was contract syphilis and write things down. So yes, timekeeping is important in religion, it's important in navigation, it's important in commerce and trade, but also timekeeping can be personal, David.

So when do clocks and devices, horologes, as you called them earlier, when do they enter the home? So small clocks that you could have in your home probably start to show, let's say soon after 1400, portable timekeepers you could carry, so what we call watches, first made in the very early 1500s. Gradually, with these personal clocks and watches increasingly near us and in view, our awareness of clock time became more and more present and personal. And this ties really closely to that idea of Benjamin Franklin and time is money. Rather than a capitalist point of view, it's from a religious point of view. People started thinking of time as something that you could waste.

When the English Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries started pushing this idea of like a pious work ethic as being the foundation of your faith. This is riveting because this is like this weird trifecta of the morality surrounding capitalism going into time. I'm on Plattus's side about like, I don't even know when I can eat or think or pray or love Jesus because of what time it is because like the whole idea of wasting time, like money,

like it being a commodity and also the sanctification of one version of spending said time. I mean, when did we start spending time? Did we start spending time after we were wasting time? Great question. I have a feeling knowing humanity, we were wasting time first because we moralize the crap out of something. And then someone's like, well, I'm going to spend my time on this. Every single person you know is like,

oh, it wasn't very productive today. And it's like, what do you need to produce? And this is such a strong, powerful idea. And it's been hammered into us for hundreds of years. There's a 17th century Puritan pastor and theologian, Richard Baxter. He published an essay in 1667. He said, if you idle away this life, will God ever give you another here and then in another treatise he claimed that idleness was a most heinous sin because by wasting time he said you are guilty of robbing God himself so you can see or like your overlords your corporate overlord gods so that idea so that idea of who are you serving whether it's God or mammon, the idea that your time's not your own, that it's somebody else's time, whether it's God's or your factory owner's,

is expressing the same idea, whether it's the Puritans or the capitalists, the idea you must not waste a single second of time, effectively, you'll spend eternity in hell. Now that's been pushed into us in the West for hundreds and hundreds of years. So is it any wonder that we've got all of these time management apps, which exhort us to fill up time? What are you doing this weekend? What you've got no plans? You're a loser. Yeah. You know, do more, do more, do it faster. Whereas I love not having anything to do this weekend. And if it were a 10 day week,

I would need nothing to do for at least four to five of those days. So in 1667, you've got the Redemption of Time essay by Richard Baxter, our Puritan theologian. Very soon after that, we also get a very iconic clock arriving in homes, one that's been made very iconic recently in Stranger Things 4. It is the grandfather clock. They show up in the mid-1600s. They're housed in these very tall, long cases. They're called long case clocks, and they swing for an exact second thanks to a 39.1 inch pendulum. It says it's 39.1 inches. I bet it's 37.

But Desiree, I wanted to ask you, why is it called a grandfather clock? I feel like things get their names for really dumb reasons, you know, like was it made by Thomas Grandfather or something? The charming name comes later, actually, in 1876, in honour of a best-selling song written by Henry Clay Work. And the song is called My Grandfather's Clock. And it's about a child who notices a creepy old long-case pendulum clock is chiming in unison with the events in their grandfather's life.

So even then, a grandfather clock was creepy as hell. Yeah, and the clock stops working when the granddad dies aged 90 so stranger things eat your heart out so if you want to hear a version of that song johnny cash did a lovely version in 1959 it's quite the bop and that's where grandfather clock comes from it's the idea that this granddad dies and the clock stops working is that why they have the birds come out of them to make them less creepy because that's the only thing that redeems clocks is sometimes a bird comes out. I find that more creepy.

Really? Than just the clock chiming? I find the sort of Swiss birds attacking you really scary. Because it's like, you've got to pick your eye out. Exactly. Okay. So now we need to talk about, well, I mean, the iconic gesture for time is running out. Is you tap your watch, right?

So when did we get wrist watches? Well, they've been around for a few centuries, but they were really jewelry worn by wealthy women. A iconic gesture for time is running out is you tap your watch, right? So when did we get wristwatches? Well, they've been around for a few centuries, but they were really jewellery worn by wealthy women. So Queen Elizabeth I of England famously had a watch set into a bracelet. In the 19th century, they were quite popular among women cycling and horse riding. OK. But it wasn't something that men would traditionally wear. Well, they had to give us ones on our wrists because we weren't allowed to have any pockets.

Well, the pocket watch was invented before the pocket. So it was just called the watch and someone's like, I don't know, put it around your neck. Around the neck or pinned to your clothing. And then somebody invented the pocket and they realized they could put it in the pocket and call it the pocket watch. Amazing. But wristwatches very much gendered in the period up to the 19th century. It was war that changed that. So it was the Second Boer War

at the turn of the 20th century and then the First World War. Soldiers began strapping watches onto their wrists. But when they did, did they have to call them man watches so that they felt okay about wearing them? I think they were probably preoccupied

by the bombs exploding right next to them. Yeah, I mean, the idea was they were in the trenches and they needed to time the waves of going over the top to their slaughter. And so they would strap the watches to their wrists so they'd have both hands free to hold their rifles. Effectively, it was that practicality that turned wristwatches into gender neutral artifacts. And they caught on very quickly after the First World War among men as well as women, to the extent that the pocket watch became effectively obsolete in just a few years. When I was a kid, the wristwatch that I was excited to have was a little Casio one. It had quartz crystals in it, which I thought was dead fancy.

And is that the sort of the great leap forward in technology? We put a crystal inside. Woo woo. And is that the sort of the great leap forward in technology? We put a crystal inside. This is science now. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, there have been other leaps beyond the mechanical geared clock with gear wheels. So electricity from the 1840s onwards could push and pull pendulums backwards and forwards using magnetism. There were devices you could plug into the mains electricity and they would take their timekeeping from the frequency of the power coming through the socket in the wall, which was pretty clever. But yeah, quartz was this big leap forward from the 1920s onwards.

The thing is that quartz crystals vibrate at a very high frequency, tens of thousands of cycles per second, rather than the one cycle per second of a pendulum. They're totally caught on. And then by the 1970s and 1980s, we all had the plastic quartz clock on the kitchen wall, and we had the black resin Casio 499 watch on our wrists. Absolutely. And then everywhere, and you know, the VCR and the microwave oven and the time switch and every computer. And suddenly high accuracy timekeeping for a fraction of a dollar was available throughout the world. Quartz watches are very accurate. The most accurate clocks, of course, are atomic clocks, which are invented in the 1950s.

They use cesium. And the most fancy ones, of course, are where, Desiree? I don't know, NASA? Yep, they're in space. Oh, in space. They just shoot them out there. GPS is a clock. We don't think of it as a clock. These satellites whizzing around above our heads are the world's most sophisticated clocks giving us everything we need for a modern technology.

Exactly. GPS satellites are basically vehicles for flying clocks over our heads all the time. I mean, the problem with those early 1950s atomic clocks was they were huge, they used a lot of power. And if you're going to build a satellite, every gram of payload mattered. So there was a breakthrough in 1971, when two German engineers, Ernst Jekard and Gerhard Hubner, built a pair of miniature atomic clocks to go on a trial satellite for GPS. And they were tiny, 10 centimetres cube, 1.3 kilos each, needed hardly any power, and they were the first atomic clocks in space. And here's the point, because those clocks that

are now on GPS satellites, they're fundamental to how the whole modern world works. It's not just military technology. It's not just sat nav to get you where you want to go. Everything in the modern world works because of the time kept by those clocks, global communications, computer systems, transport, logistics, banking, power supply. But like, this sounds like a movie that's going to have the expendables in it trying to keep China or Russia from pointing a nuke at a satellite somewhere or a bunch of them to blow up all the time because then they pull off the biggest ice or whatever. Like there's tiny clocks floating around in space. All you have to do is take those out and the world as we know it is over

is what I'm hearing. That is literally what I'm saying. Wow. That's daunting. If you put quartz clocks up into space, they would be wrong by only a billionth of a second, but that would be catastrophic. That billionth of a second would mean that your sat-nav would be out by 500 miles. You can't just stick your Casio on a rocket and hope for the best. But in terms of technology, obviously, I mean, the other thing that tells us the time now often is Alexa and Siri. We ask our personal gadgets what time it is and they speak it out to us. We hear a voice.

This has a history too. And I know you're very keen on this, David, the speaking clock. This one's really personal to me. So talking about the telephone speaking clock, it was first installed in the UK in the mid 1930s. You'd phone up and you'd get the exact time read out to you. So you'd phone up and you'd get the exact time read out to you. So in 1935, when they were building this clock, the telephone authorities decided you need to have a set of auditions to find the person who would be the voice of this new clock. They demanded a golden voice.

And there were nine finalists and it turned out I am distantly related to one of those nine finalists, Mary Dixon. She was from Jarrow. She worked at the South Shields Telephone Exchange, which is my hometown. And she lost the Girl with the Golden Voice competition in 1935 because she had a Geordie accent. Scandal. Wow. Yeah, so that accent discrimination is timeless.

Yeah. There's also other women who told the time in the 19th century, men as well, but famously women. Desiree, do you know what a knocker-upper was? Come on. This is almost about cock and clock. A knocker. I don't know what else knocking up means. I'm trying to dance around the obvious. I have no idea. I have no idea is the short answer. All right, let's show you a photo then. Maybe that'll help you out. I mean, these look like window cleaners who didn't want to get on scaffolding. Okay, this one woman is shooting like an elephant dart up to a window or something. I don't know if she's like spitballing.

It's literally just somebody who comes around to wake you up on your window. Yep. That was a job. That's it. That's amazing. Like these days, it's just somebody coming home at three in the morning, having a loud phone conversation outside of my window. Knocker uppers were hired often by factories and local businesses. And they went up and down the streets, wrapping on windows and saying, get up, it's time to do your shift, right? Yeah. So the knocker-upper would go with this long pole and wrap on the high windows. And then there's Mary Smith there from Limehouse. She would blow dried peas through a pea shooter up at the high windows to wake you up like that. It was probably knocker-uppers working into the 1950s.

The question does raise itself, how did the knockerer uppers get woken up to do their job? So were there knocker uppers, knocker uppers? Yeah, and what happened when they got pregnant? Because then you've got a knocked up, knocker upper, knocker upper. A knocked up, knocker upper. I'm probably being woken up by a cock, right? I'll leave that there. We're now into the 19th century,

and we're going to talk here a little bit about Britain and about the politics of time standardization because since time immemorial, every place had had its local time. Bristol, for example, is nine minutes behind London in terms of sunrise. So I've always heard, David, that it's the railways, the coming of the railways in the 1830s and 40s, which forces people to change, that you've got to have time unification across the country because the timetable is chaos if every town has got its own local time. So is it the universal railway that changes it or is there more going on here? I know that you've worked on this area. So what's your cutting edge theory?

Well, it is true as far as it goes that the railways brought about standardisation of time. By the 1850s, pretty much every part of the British rail network had standardised its time to London time, which meant Greenwich Mean Time, right? And the argument goes that by the 1850s, all of Britain was keeping Greenwich Time. That's where the argument falls down, because it was decades later that Britain, civil life, standardised to Greenwich time. And why did they do it in the end? Well, at least in Britain, it wasn't about the railways. It was about concerns about alcohol consumption, about factory work and conditions, about child labour. And the way the politicians wanted to regulate the sale of alcohol and control factory work and hours was using clocks. So you limit the hours of work, you limit the hours that you could buy alcohol. And legislation for both of those really came to a head in the 1870s. Thing is, if you're going to do that,

you're going to have to have everyone agree on literally what the time is. And also everyone's going to need to have access to the time. And it's that that spelled the end of that multiplicity of local times in towns and villages and cities across Britain, replaced by a single standard time for Britain, Greenwich time in 1880, Dublin time for Ireland. So the railways are really, really important, but we've got to remember there's a bigger story of standardisation as an instrument of moral control. It's the man, Desiree. It's a conspiracy. It always is. So I understand this in the context of the UK, because, I mean, clearly the time was very, very functional in keeping people in this country from drinking so much, as we've all seen and appreciated.

I'm not sure it works. drinking so much as we've all seen and appreciated i'm not sure it works but like how did greenwich's incredibly cruel meantime become a standard universally you know because it is like zero o'clock and then the other ones are adjusted based on that is that just colonialism like how did that happen that's exactly what's next in my script, Desiree. So well done you. David, colonialism, empire, what? So if we accept that timekeeping is a human invention, then of course it has to be deeply political. So the British Empire and all the other maritime empires, they were growing in the 18th century

while they were all searching for a way to solve a problem that was limiting their growth, which was called the longitude problem of maritime navigation, which is knowing your east-west position accurately. And the solution to that problem came with clocks, portable precision clocks carried on board ships that came to be known as chronometers. It was a British maker who got there first, John Harrison in 1759, who made the first of these devices. The nation that rules the waves can rule the world. And look how the British Empire developed after that. For all of those shipboard chronometers to work,

they needed to be regularly corrected during a voyage from land-based clocks. So around the coastlines of every continent on earth, all of the colonising empires built this network of big, elaborate, powerful time signals. The first British imperial time signal started in 1806 at Africa's Cape of Good Hope. It was a powerful cannon fired every day at noon from a hill overlooking Table Bay. It was hardly subtle. So yes, it was a practical navigational signal, but the symbolism could hardly be clearer. Either the rival powers ordered the indigenous African people. Britain's time shot from a powerful British cannon

right over their heads every day on the south coast of Africa. It's like the admiral in Mary Poppins who keeps firing the cannon on the top of his house. I mean, Desiree, you're in the UK at the moment, but you are from America. You have multiple time zones back home in the States. Yes, and nobody knows what time to call me and it's annoying. Well, that's, I mean, that again, that's 1884 is where we get this huge conference in Washington, DC, which decides that Greenwich, London will be the kind of prime meridian. And the idea of time zones, David,

is put forward by a Canadian railway engineer called Sanford Fleming. Yeah, he had the idea of dividing the world into 24 one-hour time zones. So you could add an hour to the clock every 15 degrees west, you go remove an hour when you go east. Of course, when you look at a time zone map, it's meant to have nice,

straight sides to each of these zones. But of course, time zones don't map onto geography or politics or the borders. China, for instance, as a country is five hours of time wide, but it's only got one time zone, which is Beijing time. It's saying the whole time of this huge country is going to be the time from the center, the political center of it in Beijing. But the political center is way east. Literally, it's dawn and they're like, oh, yeah, it's 10 a.m. because the government says it's 10 a.m. And so it's 10 a.m. Exactly that. And it was one of the first acts of Mao Zedong just after the Second World War, which was to unify China's time to one time zone,

which was a way of bringing together this new state because a time zone is just like a flag or a national anthem. It's an expression of your identity. And the politics of time zones in Europe is just extraordinary. And I really could talk for the rest of time about the political history of time zones. I think we have to get on to next, Desiree, is Daylight Saving Time. Oh, yeah.

This is stupid crap. Not a fan, then. That completely ruins our lives twice a year. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, so the history of Daylight Saving Time, I find fascinating. I've written about it as well. It's first proposed by a New Zealand postman called George Vernon Hudson in the 1890s. No one listens to him.

So the person who does sort of push it through is William Willett. Weirdly, he's an ancestor of Chris Martin from Coldplay. So a bit of trivia for you. And he writes in 1907 that people are wasting time, David, back to your point, wasting daylight. And he makes a case for it and everyone calls him a loser. So what happens? Yeah, he was another moralist. He used to go horse riding first thing in the morning when the sun was up and he

used to see that people's curtains and shutters were still closed because they were still asleep. So he wanted them to get up earlier. Now, how are you going to tell the population you should get up earlier? His solution was what we do for about a quarter of the population of Earth to this day over a century later, which was we changed the hands on every clock and watch in our country by putting the clocks forward in spring, effectively getting up an hour early. Now, it didn't catch on for Willett either. He died in 1915, having failed to get this idea taken on. idea taken on. But by then the First World War had broken out and suddenly it became sensible to try and reduce energy usage in artificial lighting in places like munitions factories. Spring forward, fall back. And we've been doing it ever since. Yeah. And America was hilariously bad at it. So in 1963, an official report complained that because

individual towns and states and cities could choose whether to opt in or not to daylight saving time and when they would start it and stop it, you could literally travel 35 miles between Moundsville, West Virginia and Steubenville, Ohio, and you would go through seven time zones in that 35 miles, which is amazing. What time is it? It's freedom time. We don't care about your rules. It's the time we say it is. Yeah. So and it's still super controversial even now, David. I know every year the debate comes up

with daylight saving time in Parliament. People are like, this is stupid. And yet at the same time, we're still persisting with it. But we need to move on. The nuance window. The Nuance Window! It's time now for The Nuance Window. This is where Desiree and I take a time out. And David has two minutes. And he's going to tell us about why we need to think about time as a political thing. So, David, without much further ado, here is your time to shine.

We've been talking a lot about how people have always used clocks to control our lives, but we've also heard that people have been resisting that idea for thousands of years. When those first public sundials came to ancient Rome, people called for the columns on which they were mounted to be torn down with crowbars. Throughout history people have fought back against the tyranny of the clock. In 1894 on a grassy hill outside the Greenwich Royal Observatory a young French anarchist called Marshal Baudin blew himself up. It was a botched bombing not a suicide attempt. What he'd planned to do was to throw a bomb at the public clock mounted in the observatory's gate posts the first clock in the world to show official Greenwich Mean Time and he wanted to resist what he thought was the tyranny of centralized control and hierarchical order by symbolically and physically stopping the clock that made it all work and he wasn't the only one

who pushed back sometimes violently against clocks. There's factory workers in Europe, there's labourers in Africa, anti-colonialists in India, nationalists in Ireland, enslaved workers in the American South and many other places. And this story of resistance is a story that I'm interested in immensely. But people have started building clocks as a form of resistance as well, using clocks to resist the short-termism of the modern world and modern political decision-making. In 1970, a clock was buried under a park in Osaka that will run for 5,000 years in a time capsule. There's a musical composition being played in a lighthouse

in East London for the last 22 years, and it's going to play for 1,000 years before it repeats. And there's a mechanical pendulum clock being built in Texas right now that's going to run for 10,000 years. And they're all helping us resist that sense of hurry sickness. It's probably not doing us much good. I mean, clocks have brought great positive change to the world. I think they're amazing, but they're also complicated. They represent the flow of power through societies. And I think that's why we're so fascinated with them. But I think I've run out of time. Amazing. Thank you, David. What do you think of that? That was beautiful and tragic, because as you're saying all that, it's so true. And it's like, but your time's up.

Exactly. There I was with my stopwatch going, and that's enough now, David. But it's time now for So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for our comedian, Desiree, to see how much she has remembered. And we have fired some stuff at you, Desiree. Oh, my gosh. Like, this has been the most brainiac numbers, time, names, locations, place in the world.

You have 40 out of 40 so far. Stop saying that. It doesn't help. You don't understand my ability to biff it in the 11th hour. It's kind of my thing. Let's see. Okay, so 10 questions. Here we go.

Question one. What is the ancient Greek word for a water clock, meaning water thief? Water thief. So it's kleptoras, something like that? Klepsydra. Klepsydra. I'll let you have that. Question two.

Used in medieval China, what was a fire clock? The incense clock. Yep, absolutely. Question three. After conquering Catania in Sicily, what did the Romans steal and put in their forum, even though it was inaccurate? They took the clock that was there, that was like a sundial. Question four. Is a cock a clock? Yes, a cock is a clock.

Question five. The oldest surviving mechanical clock? Yes, a cock is a clock. Question five. The oldest surviving mechanical clock is about 600 years old. David has visited it. In which country can you find it? Is that the one in Venice? It is, yeah. Italy. Very good. Question six. Why do we call long case clocks grandfather clocks? Because some dude wrote a song that Johnny Cash covered about his grandfather dying at 90 when the clock stopped. That's it. Question seven. Who was a knocker rapper? Seth Rogen in that movie. No, it was somebody who woke you up for the early shit by banging

on your window and they didn't have guns at that time to shoot that person and stop that practice from happening. Exactly. Question eight. What was the girl with the golden voice competition in 1935? This was the Time X Factor competition that happened for the voice of the time when you called the phone number, which I remember doing in the 80s in America, but it was a different voice. Question nine. During the French Revolution, what new time system was trialed and then abandoned after 18 or 15 months? Good old guillotine time. Tens, on the tens and not the one twos. That's right. Metric time or decimal time. This for a perfect score again, Desiree Birch. This to be the all-time champion. What is the name of the mathematical system based on the number 12 that was used in the ancient Bronze Age and is still used today for timekeeping?

Oh, shut your face, uncle. Okay, hold on. It's like duodecimal? Is that how you say it? Duodecimal is right. Oh, God. Perfect score. 50 out of 50.

Yes. Unrelenting conqueror. Amazing. Desire are you pleased almost like time yeah unrelenting conqueror well if you come back one more time you can get 60 out of 60 and that will be like time there we go yes phenomenal stuff oh well i mean this. And also, I didn't realize how political and horrible time was like that's a one of my fave episodes and of course if you want to chase another ordinary subject through the ages why not check out our episode on the history of high-heeled shoes they are a timeless classic and remember if you enjoyed the podcast please leave a review share the show with your friends and subscribe to your dead to me on bbc sound so you never miss an episode but all that's left for me now is time to say thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the dazzling Dr. David Rooney.

Thank you, David. Thank you. I've had a great time. Honestly, all of us with our time puns. And in Comedy Corner, we had the duodecimal delight, the quiz queen herself, Desiree Birch. Thank you, Desiree. Yes. Thank you so much.

I can't wait to do this one more time. Ah, very good. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time when we time travel to another corner of the past with two different time hoppers. But for now, I'm off to go and build myself a fire clock that smells like Nutella. Bye!

You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. The research was by Rosie Rich. The episode was scripted and produced by Emma Neguse and me. And the assistant producer was Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow. The project manager was Isla Matthews. And the audio producers were Steve Hankey and Abby Patterson. I'm Gus Casely-Hayford. As a historian, I love to unpick the hidden histories behind what we wear.

In my series Torn for BBC Radio 4, we hear about the fashion items that have changed the world. From the humble tote bag... I have a textile dating from late 17th century. And it is quite like a modern tote bag, with have a textile dating from late 17th century. And it is quite like a modern tote bag with a beautiful pattern of crisscross and flowers. And just two elongated handles. To the miniskirt. There were other possibilities in the air.

And the miniskirt was the beginning of saying we are somebody different. That's Torn from BBC Radio 4. Listen to stories that are woven into the fashion items in your wardrobe. Subscribe now on BBC Sounds. bond pull apart only at wendy's it's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long taxes extra at participating wendy's until may 5th terms and conditions apply