Slow Down London: Making Time

Tonight we went to a lecture at the National Portrait Gallery called Making Time, delivered by David Rooney, Curator of Timekeeping at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

The talk is part of a programme of events called Slow Down London, a project which hopes to inspire Londoners to take the time to appreciate the things around them and do things well instead of just rapidly.

We didn’t really know what to expect, but what we got was an extremely interesting and amusing account of the story of the UK’s relationship with time, and the personalities and quirky events surrounding its measurement and management.

I love these little nuggets of curious fact, and David provided them with great style, his passion for the subject obviously showing through. The next best thing after being provided with a list of weird trivia is an educated and articulate person having a good rant on the subject.

Some things I did not know:

  • Before the introduction of “railway time” in the 1830s, Britain had no standard civil time, with local times varying as much as half an hour across the country.
  • “Railway time” was only adopted legally as standard civil time across the country in the 1880s when the first licensing laws were introduced, banning the sale of alcohol after midnight, or 11pm in the provinces. Selling alcohol after the official time would lead to loss of licence.
  • Before radio and telegram, captains of vessels in the Thames would send a deck hand up to the observatory to ask them what the time was, and have it synchronised to the ship’s chronometer. The burden of receiving all these visitors led to the observatory installing a “time ball” on its tower which could be seen from the docks, allowing the ships to tell the time without visiting in person.
  • For over a hundred years starting in the 1830s, John Henry Belville and his descendants would set the time daily on a pocket watch and then travel around London visiting their subscribers, who paid a fee to have their own timepieces set to the observatory’s clock. This was important for many businesses such as those who made the naval chronometers, since the “time ball” tower could not be seen from most of London.
  • The first time broadcasts on the BBC wireless radio service in the 1920s were done by having someone stand by an open window and listen for the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral, then they would attempt to sound their own chimes in time with that. According to David’s measurements this meant that at best the time signal was about 2.5 seconds late due to the speed of sound.
  • Britain only adopted British Summer Time because the First World War was on and the Germans did it first in order to use energy for making ammunition instead of lighting ammunition factories. Not wanting to lose any advantage, Britain did so too.

I was happy to learn these and many other pieces of trivia this evening.