About Time Read online

  About

  Time

  A History of Civilization

  in Twelve Clocks

  DAVID ROONEY

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  Korean Air Lines Flight 007, 1983

  1.

  Order

  Sundial at the Forum, Rome, 263 BCE

  2.

  Faith

  Castle Clock, Diyār Bakr, 1206

  3.

  Virtue

  The Hourglass of Temperance, Siena, 1338

  4.

  Markets

  Stock Exchange Clock, Amsterdam, 1611

  5.

  Knowledge

  Samrat Yantra, Jaipur, 1732–35

  6.

  Empires

  Observatory Time Ball, Cape Town, 1833

  7.

  Manufacture

  Gog and Magog, London, 1865

  8.

  Morality

  Electric Time System, Brno, 1903–6

  9.

  Resistance

  Telescope Driving-Clock, Edinburgh, 1913

  10.

  Identity

  Golden Telephone Handsets, London, 1935

  11.

  War

  Miniature Atomic Clocks, Munich, 1972

  12.

  Peace

  Plutonium Timekeeper, Osaka, 6970

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Sources

  Credits

  Index

  Illustrations

  Artist’s impression of speakers in Rome’s Forum, published in 1851

  10

  Tower of the Winds, Athens, photographed in the twentieth century

  13

  Approach to Ajmer showing Mayo College with clock tower, photographed c. 1900s

  23

  Fourteenth-century illustration of al-Jazarī’s castle clock

  27

  Lübeck astronomical clock, photographed c. 1870

  37

  Makkah Royal Clock Tower overlooking the Great Mosque of Mecca, photographed in 2012

  44

  Temperance holding an hourglass, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338

  50

  Temperance surrounded by clockwork technology, illustrated in Heinrich Suso, Clock of Wisdom, c. 1450

  57

  The Triumph of Death, painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1562

  61

  Amsterdam Stock Exchange, engraved in 1612

  65

  London Stock Exchange trading floor and clock c. 1800, engraved c. 1878

  71

  Telehouse data-center complex, London, photographed in 2020

  80

  Samrat Yantra sundial at Jai Singh’s Jaipur observatory, photographed in 1915

  84

  Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory, photographed in June 1957

  95

  Cape observatory with time ball on mast, engraved in 1857

  104

  Royal Observatory, Greenwich, chronometer-testing room, photographed c. 1897

  110

  Piccadilly Circus world-time clock being demonstrated in 1929

  115

  Gog and Magog behind a projecting clock on John Bennett’s shop front, with other horological attractions, photographed in 1891

  125

  Crowds on Cheapside, outside John Bennett’s shop, photographed in 1904

  127

  Henry Ford’s staff removing Gog and Magog from John Bennett’s shop front, 1929

  139

  St. James’s Church and clock tower from Brno’s central square, photographed in the early twentieth century

  143

  Assistant at the Greenwich observatory time-signal control desk, c. 1897

  147

  Officials investigating bomb damage at the Edinburgh observatory, 1913

  160

  Government sketch showing the scene of the Greenwich observatory explosion, 1894

  170

  Greenwich observatory official posing with gate clock, c. 1925

  172

  Crawford Market and clock tower, Bombay, in an early-twentieth-century postcard

  175

  Ethel Cain, photographed after winning the “Golden Voice” competition final, 1935

  180

  Family photograph of Mary Dixon (right) with her older sisters, Anne (middle) and Margaret (left), outside their home in Jarrow, 1930s

  181

  Watchmaker Daniela Toms adjusting a Charles Frodsham and Co. wristwatch, 2020

  188

  Efratom miniature atomic clock, backup for the two clocks installed on the NTS-1 satellite, made c. 1972

  198

  Thwaites and Reed rolling-ball clock, made c. 1972

  202

  Doomsday Clock, photographed on January 23, 2020, after having been adjusted to 100 seconds to midnight

  204

  Plutonium timekeeper buried at Osaka, 1970

  215

  About

  Time

  Introduction

  Korean Air Lines Flight 007, 1983

  It is the early hours of a crisp Alaskan morning. Korean Air Lines’ Captain Chun Byung-in, First Officer Son Dong-hui and Flight Engineer Kim Eui-dong stride purposefully across the tarmac of Anchorage International Airport and climb into the cockpit of the Boeing 747 airliner that they are rostered to fly to Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport.

  Flight KAL 007 has stopped off at Anchorage on its journey from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport for servicing, refueling and a changeover of the flight and cabin crew. The Alaskan airport, on the northwest tip of North America, is, at this time, a common staging post for flights between the USA and eastern Asia. Much airspace over the communist countries of Asia and Europe is closed to foreign traffic, meaning longer routings for flights seeking to find a way through safe international corridors. But Chun, the pilot of the flight, knows the passage from Anchorage to Seoul like the back of his hand, having flown it for half a decade.

  The first leg of flight KAL 007 has been uneventful for the 269 people on board, and weather conditions for the second leg are predicted to be good, with lower than average headwinds meaning the flight duration will be slightly reduced. In order to arrive at Seoul on time, the departure from Anchorage is therefore set back by half an hour. The final checks are completed and nothing seems out of the ordinary. A route is punched into the navigation computer that will take the aircraft safely around the outer edges of prohibited airspace, and the airport’s radar systems record flight KAL 007 in the air at 4 a.m., Alaska time. It has all the makings of an unremarkable flight.

  The hours pass. Conversation among the flight crew is jovial and relaxed. At certain points during the flight, they contact ground controllers to report their position and weather, and to confirm plans. Breakfast is served to the passengers, just as normal.

  But there is a problem with the aircraft’s autopilot. What Chun, Son and Kim have not realized is that it has not been set up correctly, and throughout the course of the flight from Alaska they have strayed increasingly to the north of their intended route. It is the worst possible mistake they could have made. With no way to double-check their position, they have relied on their navigational equipment to direct the aircraft along the required route, but it has taken them directly into prohibited airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula and the island of Sakhalin.

  Five hours after the Boeing jet leaves Alaska, and unknown to the Korean flight crew, a Sukhoi Su-15 supersonic jet, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Gennadi Osipovich, is scrambled to intercept the airliner. Osipovich’s military commanders have recently spotted a US spy plane operating in the area, monitoring a missile test being carried out. This is a well-known Boeing RC-135 four-engine reconnaissance jet, similar in many ways to the Boeing 747 passenger jet but without the distinctive hump above the cockpit. Osipovich and his bosses are convinced the Korean Air Lines aircraft is another US spy plane.

  Twenty minutes later, having reached the airliner with its oblivious crew and passengers, Osipovich fires a burst of warning shots from his cannon across the Boeing’s nose, but the shells cannot be seen by the Korean crew, who carry on chatting, unaware of the danger that is fast closing in on them. Six minutes after that, Osipovich launches two air-to-air missiles at the Korean airliner. One misses, but the other explodes at the Boeing’s tail, severing hydraulic control lines and inflicting significant structural damage. Shrapnel from the blast penetrates the airliner’s fuselage, causing the cabin to decompress. Though it has been mortally wounded, flight KAL 007 continues to fly onward as the crew struggles to regain control. Automated announcements on the public-address system begin to sound throughout the aircraft, thirty seconds after the missile strikes. “Attention. Emergency descent. Put out your cigarette. This is an emergency descent.” Oxygen masks drop from the ceilings in the cabin and cockpit and the PA system begins to shout, “Put the mask over your nose and mouth and adjust the head band. Attention. Emergency descent.”1

  The airliner continues to hurtle through the skies above the Sea of Japan. The passengers who remain conscious, while they do not know what hit them, or why, are in no doubt about the grave danger they face if the aircraft cannot be brought into an emergency landing. The crew continue to wrestle valiantly with the controls as they become less and less responsive. The airplane bucks and rolls as it is buffeted by winds and weather, having lost the aerodynamics needed for safe flight. Twelve minutes
after the missile is fired, what limited control the pilots have of the jet is lost and, having plummeted down in a deadly spiral, flight KAL 007 slams into the ocean. The terror is finally over. It is the morning of September 1, 1983, and there are no survivors.

  Overhead, a fleet of seven experimental US military satellites called Navstars is orbiting. Each satellite is the size of a family automobile and weighs just short of a ton. They are powered by a combination of solar cells and hydrazine rocket fuel, and the fleet has been launched, one by one, every few months since 1978. Between them, these satellites are carrying twenty-five high-precision clocks, built in California, as part of a navigational experiment called the Global Positioning System.

  These clocks could have saved everyone on board flight KAL 007.

  FOUR DAYS AFTER the Korean airliner was shot down by a Soviet missile, the US president, Ronald Reagan, made an emotional television address in which he described the tragedy as a “massacre,” a “crime against humanity” and an “act of barbarism” by the Soviet authorities, vowing to take steps to ensure it never happened again.2

  The experimental satellites flying above the aircraft as it plummeted down to Earth were the first in a constellation we know today as GPS, then being developed by the US military. Each GPS satellite carried three or four miniature atomic clocks, which beamed precise time signals to Earth, where people carrying GPS receivers could find their position to within tens of yards. Today, the GPS system involves around thirty-two satellites that are active at any one time, and the latest ones carry clocks far more reliable and accurate than the first ones, made in the mid-1970s.

  These space clocks have now become an invisible part of our everyday lives, providing not just precise locations but synchronizing all modern infrastructure, from telecommunications to power supply. In September 1983, the experimental GPS satellites were used only by the military. But the downing of KAL 007, with the loss of 269 innocent lives, changed that. Eleven days after his television address, Reagan announced through his press secretary that civilian aircraft would be allowed to use GPS when it became operational. If the experimental time signals had been available to the Korean pilots, they might have alerted them to their navigational error and averted the tragedy of September 1, 1983.

  These rather austere 1970s clocks, manufactured in a joint venture between the American firm Rockwell and the German clockmaker Efratom, housed in rugged aluminum boxes and hardened against the battering they would receive when launched into space, may not match up to our mental image of fine, important clocks. They are not conventionally beautiful, and there are few collectors willing to give room in their houses for them. Yet they have changed the world, not just technically, but politically and culturally. They are clocks placed above our heads by a military superpower. The service they provide is not—was never—benign. Should we not, therefore, consider them more critically than we do?

  The original 1970s clocks are still with us. Superseded by more recent technology, the twenty-five clocks on those first seven GPS satellites, which were orbiting Earth as flight KAL 007 plunged into the Sea of Japan, are nevertheless still in orbit around the Earth. These are real clocks, made by clockmakers in factories like Rockwell’s and Efratom’s in California, but now shut down, drifting eternally and silently over our heads on long-retired satellites. The night sky is a museum of old clocks, if we could see that far.

  SINCE THE EARLIEST civilizations, people of all cultures have made and used clocks. From the city sundials of ancient Rome to the medieval water clocks of imperial China, and from hourglasses fomenting a quiet revolution in the Middle Ages to Enlightenment observatories in India, a history of clocks is a history of civilization. This book, then, is for anybody interested in the history of the world, in politics, and in how the story of timing is the story of us. It will explore twelve case studies—twelve real clocks from our past—to show how, for thousands of years, time has been harnessed, politicized and weaponized. With clocks, the elites wield power, make money, govern citizens and control lives. And sometimes, also with clocks, people fight back. None of this is abstract. These are real clocks with recoverable histories that bring pivotal and sometimes violent moments from the past vividly to life.

  MY FASCINATION WITH clocks and their history started at a young age. In 1982, when I was eight years old, my parents decided to set up a clock-making and restoration business. My mother had been a researcher for Tyne Tees Television in the mid-1960s before becoming a teacher. My father had been an engineering draftsman at the Hebburn-based firm of Baker Perkins, before he, too, started teaching. But they had always yearned to run their own business and, in the early 1980s, took the plunge. They worked from our family home, a terraced house in South Shields, on England’s cold North Sea coast as it meets the River Tyne. We lived, as it happens, close to the old Harton Pit, a former coal mine that in 1854 was the scene of pioneering experiments by the nation’s top time scientists using pendulum clocks to study the density of the Earth. Clocks had been the talk of the town in nineteenth-century South Shields.

  Our dining room was converted to a horological workshop and library. A spare bedroom became the office. The kitchen table, where we ate all our meals, was where as a child I picked up the language of clocks and watches, hearing discussions about the arcane technology of horology—fusees, escapements, oscillators—as well as the challenges of working with these complex machines and of running a business. I heard about my parents’ dealings with horology’s noted scholars and collectors, and I often accompanied them to set up clocks in country houses and museums across Scotland and the north of England.

  I suppose I absorbed a hybrid combination of my father’s technical appreciation of clocks and my mother’s experience in research for television documentaries. Both my parents understood how important it was to tell their clients the stories of the clocks they worked on. It was never just a matter of fixing them up. Each clock had a life story and was part of history, however modest; it was my parents’ job to find this story and share it.

  Having lived through a decade of clockmaking and its history as a child, I left for university, where I studied physics, and later the history of science and technology while I was working as a technology curator at the Science Museum in London. At the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, where I became curator of timekeeping in the mid-2000s, I was given unfettered access to one of the world’s most remarkable collections of precision clocks and watches. Three days a week, I wound the celebrated marine timekeepers made by John “Longitude” Harrison and helped look after the observatory’s time ball and its pioneering Victorian electrical time network. And I volunteered every month at Belmont, a country house in Kent which holds one of the world’s finest private collections of clocks and watches.

  I was hooked. Later, back at the Science Museum, I looked after its own horology collection, among others, and started collaborating with the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers over its museum, the oldest of its type in the world, which moved to South Kensington in 2015. I also benefited over the years from the company, wisdom and patience of countless clock, watch and time specialists who generously shared their knowledge and passions with me, and still do. Throughout all this, my interest in these remarkable devices has only grown.

  What fascinates me most is what clocks mean, a question which is answered by looking at why people have made them. The more I have learned, the more it has become obvious that the technical history of horology is only the start of the story. It is human motivation and how the world works that really interests me, which is why this is a story centered on power, control, money, morality and belief.

  IT SHOULD BE apparent by now that this is not a conventional history of clocks and watches; nor does it deal with the more abstract concept of time itself—what philosophers and scientists think time is. There are many books which do this far better than I ever could, and I will therefore leave it to the experts. Nor is this a broad, sweeping account of the history of civilizations, like the fine works of the French historian Fernand Braudel or any number of other great scholars. Instead, it is a personal, idiosyncratic and above all partial account. It looks at how we can understand our history better if we examine artifacts that, for one reason or another, shed light on aspects of civilizations that matter to us. These aspects include the ways we are governed; the beliefs we hold; and the ways we tell stories. We will use the history of clocks to look at capitalism, the exchange of knowledge, the building of empires and the radical changes to our lives brought by industrialization. We will consider morality—right and wrong—as well as identity—who we are—all mediated by clocks. And we will look unflinchingly at life, death, war and peace. People use clocks to kill us, but clocks might save us, too, if we would only think about the power they wield.