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How important is time to scientific experiments and research? How hobbled would scientists be if there were no way to measure time precisely?
Mankind has been fascinated by time for millennia. Pharaohs tried to extend their share of it to live forever, with all the comforts of the palace coming along on the journey.
Look up the word “time” in Google or Bing and you’ll be entertained for (so to speak) a good long time.
No Accepted Definition
You’ll find out that the word “time” has no universally accepted definition. That people have used everything from the transit of the sun across the sky, to the phases of the moon, to the pendulum, to the beat of the human heart to measure it.
That the root of the word for clock comes from the one for “bell” — hence the maritime “eight bells.”
You’ll read science fiction writer Ray Cummings’ comment “time is what keeps everything from happening at once.”
So it’s worth noting that today in 1675 England’s King Charles II commissioned the Royal Greenwich Observatory “to be the center of time and space on earth.”
Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the Observatory was the first structure in Britain build specifically for a scientific purpose.
First Accurate Longitudinal Measurements
At the same time, the king created the position of the Astronomer Royal. His job? To rectify the existing tables of the “motions of the heavens” and the positions of the fixed stars. Thus the observatory became home of the first marine timekeepers to determine longitude accurately enough for navigation.
Initially, the observatory also calculated Greenwich Mean Time, eliminating the need for each town to set its own time.
But since 1833, Britons and sailors at sea have been able to set their clocks by the observatory’s “time balls,” a series of 60 spheres (not so different from the one in New York’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve). Distributed around the earth, the balls still drop every day at precisely one p.m. local time.
Dividing East from West
In 1855 the observatory established a “prime meridian” as the boundary between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. Originally marked by a brass strip, the meridian is now marked by a powerful green laser shining north across the London sky.
In one unscientific footnote to the observatory’s history, a 26-year-old French anarchist named Martial Bourdin tried to bomb it in 1894, possibly the first ‘international terrorist’ incident in Britain.
No on knows why Bourdin did it, but novelist Joseph Conrad used the incident as inspiration for his novel The Secret Agent.
Observatory Decommissioned
Over the first half of the 20th century the Royal Observatory was gradually decommissioned, when light pollution from London and electrical interference from the nearby railway system made it impossible for it to function as a working observatory.
Today the observatory is a museum, planetarium, and tourist attraction. But it’s still the official starting point for each new day, year, and millennium.
