A clock in a high tower sends a message: Here is the knowledge. “By forcing a sense of temporal order on to the population, these public timekeepers stood for a wider sense of civic order,” Rooney says. From the first, rulers used the clock as a means of control or even subjugation. Sundials were followed by water clocks and then mechanical clocks, and clock towers used drums and bells to broadcast time to the populace. The first Roman sundial-“mounted up high, looking over the people, and standing for Rome’s ruling classes themselves”-had power both symbolic and real. At the outset, he disclaims any intention to explore the nature of time itself as a scientific or philosophical problem he will leave that “to the experts.” For him, clocks convey a variety of meanings that flow from the people who make and deploy them. The clocks he reflects on (many more than twelve) are instruments of power, money, and faith. They communicate messages about temporality that go beyond the number representing the present instant. Fraser, the influential twentieth-century scholar of time, often emphasized that the clock must be seen not only as a device but as a metaphor. He has also served as steward of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, which has as its motto Tempus Rerum Imperator (Time, the Ruler of All Things). Rooney oversaw these as curator of timekeeping from 2004 to 2009. Besides being the origin point for what is now known as Coordinated Universal Time ( UTC), Greenwich collects and preserves precision timepieces dating back to the sixteenth century. Perhaps it was inevitable that as an adult he would find his way to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the very epicenter of the world’s clocks. “I picked up the language of clocks and watches,” Rooney writes, “hearing discussions about the arcane technology of horology-fusees, escapements, oscillators-as well as the challenges of working with these complex machines.”Īccompanying his parents to museums and country houses, he came to feel that every clock has a story. They became horologists, practicing a specialty that combines mechanical engineering with scholarship and antiquarianism. When he was eight years old his parents, both schoolteachers, decided to start a business making and restoring clocks in their home on the northeast coast of England. Rooney’s own relationship with clocks is long and deep. Rooney says, “We tend to use it to mean fixed devices, either electronic or involving intermeshing geared wheels, that keep time and show it to us.” But he will define the word as broadly as possible to include anything that tracks the passage of time: sundials, hourglasses, kitchen timers, and all the rest, including the clock on your wrist and the other one in your pocket. The word clock may come from an Old French word for bell, cloche or cloque. (Though some physicists, seconded by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, like to say that time is what clocks measure.) Clocks also transmit information. And this new temporal order was sweeping civilizations across the world.” In his insightful, globe-spanning new book, About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, he sets out to show that this ancient device is neither simple nor innocent, that clocks are designed with hidden agendas and ulterior motives, and that their influence on human societies and the human psyche has been more profound than we usually imagine.ĭo we need a definition for this ubiquitous object? A clock is a device that measures time, I would say. “Romans were forced to live their lives by the clock. Plautus, a comedy writer, may have been half-kidding, but David Rooney is not. “You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial, by far the best and truest.” People have been complaining about clocks ever since. “The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours, and-yes-who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits,” wrote Plautus. When the first public sundial arrived in Rome, a trophy of war expropriated from Sicily in the third century BCE and mounted in the Forum for all to see, some Romans cursed it. And don’t say time “marches on.” We march on. It cannot see you it has always been blind to the human and the things we do to stave it off, the taxonomies, the cleaning, the arranging, the ordering.Īnd the clocks! The clocks, especially-they promise control, efficiency, or even power, but time doesn’t care. Time would not care if you fell out of it. Time is impassive, more animal than human.
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