You're Dead to Me - The History of Timekeeping (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: July 15, 2023

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.For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.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 HankeyYou’re Dead To Me is a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

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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 bestselling 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 Civilization in 12 Clocks. I absolutely loved it. It's Dr David Rooney. Welcome, David. Hello, Greg. And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, writer and TV host who hardly needs any introduction on this show. You'll have seen her on Live at the Apollo, The Mash Report, Mock the Week and of course Taskmaster. 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 time keeping. 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 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. Are you 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, you know, that's the range. So what do you know? Like, you know, that's the range. 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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 start comes from words that mean bell. So like

cloche or glocker or clocker. It's easy to kind of assume that a clock means some kind of mechanical device. 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. 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. I mean, in terms of the technology of timekeeping, the earliest technology we've got evidence for is in the Bronze Age. 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. So sundials are 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. 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. 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? Bong! Yes! Just, I mean, not the worst job except for 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 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 sundials skating in, being like, it's this o'clock, it's that o'clock. Don't tell me what time it is. You're absolutely right, David. There's some seriously grumpy texts we have from this period. That's almost literally word for word from what was being said.

There's this incredible line written in a play that was written at the time that those sundials were spreading all over Rome. 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. Wow, that's pretty epic. So the Romans, Desiree, would bisect 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? 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 has September, April, June, and November kind of song to remind them of how long an hour was, depending on what day.

Maybe. 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. 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 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. 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.

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. 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. So what it is, it's an octagonal marble tower,

about 14 metres high, 8 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? 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. How did it steal the time then? 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, 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 klepsiger in a tall tower fitted with drums or bells from which the time would be sounded to us, the public. 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. Or like maybe the crispness of the air or some kind of...

Very nice. 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? 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. 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. 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 so we're in the medieval world and this is where we get our mechanical clocks, our clocker, our bells. 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, 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. 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. So there was 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. 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, 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 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? 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 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,

is expressing the same idea, whether it's the Puritans or the capitalists. 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. You know, do more, do more, do it faster. 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 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. 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... 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. And so they would strap the watches to their wrists so they'd have both hands free to hold their rifles. 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 sort of the great leap forward in technology? 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. 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. The satellites whizzing around above our heads are the world's most sophisticated clocks, giving us everything we need for a modern technology. the world's most sophisticated clocks giving us everything we need for modern technology. Exactly. GPS satellites are basically vehicles for flying clocks over our heads all the time. 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 heist 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. 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. We are now into 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 rail network had standardised its time to London time, which meant Greenwich Mean Time. 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 civilised, 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. 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? 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. There's 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. Britain's time shot from a powerful British cannon right over their heads every day on the south coast of Africa. 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 the politics or the borders. I think we have to get on to next, Desiree, is Daylight Saving Time. Oh, yeah. 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. 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. 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 earlier. Now, it didn't catch on for Willett either. He died in 1915, having failed to get this 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. 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.

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 the 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 Bourdin 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 gateposts, the first clock in the world to show official Greenwich Mean Time. And he wanted to resist what he thought was the tyranny of centralised 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. 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 exactly they're rewards with my stopwatch guy and that's enough now david 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 and in comedy corner we had the duodecimal delight, Desiree Birch. Thank you, Desiree. Thank you so much. 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 Dr Michael Mosley

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