From the sundials of ancient Rome to the modern era of the smartwatch, clocks have been used throughout history to control people and influence many facets of our lives, says time expert and historian David Rooney.
Rooney, who is a former curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, helps run three horological institutions, including the world's oldest clock and watch museum, and lives in London, close to the Greenwich meridian.
In his new book, About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, Rooney paints a horological history of human civilisation, told through 12 world-changing clocks.
Photo: AFP
Rooney tells Jim Mora timekeeping has been used by humans across history to wield power, make money, govern citizens, and keep control.
“Even back to second century China, there were bell and drum towers in places like Luoyang, which … would be sounded to the curfew at the end of the day or at the start of the day, you know, it’s time to get up. So, we march to the beat of clocks, we always have.”
Many big tower timekeepers or clocks, in fact, acted as sorts of rulers at a distance as empires grew, he says, with some early examples being of clock towers in India that were topped with a replica of Queen Victoria’s crown when she was Empress of India.
“By the 1900s, there was only one continent on Earth which wasn’t encircled by time signalling infrastructure, by which I mean big expensive installations like time balls, and that continent was Antarctica.”
The first public sundial in Rome, mounted between 300 and 260BC, was captured from Carthaginians and also used a symbol of power.
“It was mounted on a tall column in the Roman Forum, right at the heart of the city.
“It was in some senses a war trophy … but very soon it started to change the lives of ordinary Romans in ways which we now would find very, very familiar.”
Complex astronomical clock towers, like this one pictured in Prague, were reminders for people to know their place in the big universe, says time expert and historian David Rooney. Photo: 123RF / Erwin Wodicka
Quotations from that period show that the idea that we’re enslaved by time has been around for thousands of years, Rooney says.
“The character in this play is saying that the Gods should damn the person who first discovered the hours and the person who first set up the sun dial here in Rome, he said, who smashed, cut and hacked the day into bits.
“He went on to say, you know, when I was a boy my stomach was the only sun dial, it was the best and the truest compared to all of these real sun dials coming into Rome, saying now that my stomach used to warn me when it was time to eat, but now I can’t eat unless the sun says so.”
The embodiment of political power in clocks made the first public GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) clock a target for an apparent bomb attack in 1894, which failed, by a French anarchist, he says.
“Just 10 years earlier, the world had come together to decide on prime meridian for the world, one time for the world, and that was chosen to be Greenwich.
“So you can imagine, that if you were an anarchist in France, who was seeking to demolish the structures of hierarchy, well the very institution that seeks to make the whole world march to its beat, I’m sure his intention was to blow up the clock … and, symbolically and very violently, to stop time.”
An aerial view shows the Clock Tower and the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia's holy Muslim city of Mecca on September 25, 2015. Photo: Ozkan Bilgin / Anadolu Agency via AFP
But size is also an expression of power too, Rooney says. One of the biggest clocks today is in Saudi Arabia.
“It’s a third of a mile high, its dials are 43 metres in diameter, it’s the biggest and it’s the highest clock in the world. It’s six times the size of Big Ben. It overlooks the central mosque of Mecca, the most holy site in Islam.
“An astonishing construction finished about the year 2012. The call to prayer, the azan, is shone from 21,000 lamps at the top of the clock which can be seen from 19 miles away.
“At the time, there was lobbying from some of the Saudi Arabian officials to have the prime meridian of the world redrawn, for it to be the meridian of Mecca, rather than Greenwich.”
Whether it’s about when you wake up, go to bed, work, eat, people in power are using clocks to enact their moral code of what they believe is right and wrong, Rooney says.
(File image) Photo: 123RF
About a quarter of the population today still switch their clocks twice a year in accordance with ‘daylight savings’, which started because of an Edwardian moralist’s views on time.
“Clocks have brought great power and have contributed to human progress in myriad ways, they have brought order to society in so many profoundly positive ways.
“However, we should always just remember that when we’re dealing with morals or politics or with who gets to choose how people behave, well I think that’s something we would do well to study and understand as well as we can so we’re better informed to be part of the debates about them.”
With the development of time-keeping devices, like our smartphones, we feel even more inclined to make use of every minute, he says.
“Some other writers have called it hurry sickness, the fact that because we’ve had clocks that can measure time more and more finely, can slice and dice it into smaller fragments, that we inevitably hurry up, we inevitably do things faster and faster.”
