Throughout history, clocks have rarely been just a matter of time

About Time: A History of Civilisation in Twelve Clocks. By David Rooney. W.W. Norton; 288 pages; $28.95. Viking; £16.99

IN 2015 KIM JONG UN, North Korea’s supreme leader, decreed that every clock in his country must move back by half an hour. The idea was to right what he saw as a historical wrong. Japan ruled Korea between 1910 and 1945 and, during that period, it replaced Korea’s existing time zone with a new one set half an hour forward. “The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time,” explained North Korea’s news agency.

But the restoration proved short-lived. In 2018, in a more emollient mood, Mr Kim spoke of his sadness at seeing clocks display different times for Pyongyang and Seoul, the capitals of North and South Korea respectively. As a result, all the North’s clocks were dutifully moved half an hour forward again.

Time, as David Rooney argues in his new book, is often a political subject—as well as a technological, cultural, imperial or religious one. Armed with that insight, Mr Rooney—a former curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich—is the latest author to try his hand at a fashionable style of writing that uses everyday objects as a means to analyse the twists and turns of history. As Mr Rooney observes, clocks are rarely ever built simply to measure time; like any other technology, they are built with some human goal in mind. So although the book is organised around 12 clocks, and starts with the ancient world and finishes with the modern one, it is more a collection of historical, horological ruminations than a systematic, linear history of timekeeping.

The result is a book that is often fascinating, but just as often frustratingly uneven. Tales of clocks serve as jumping-off points for discursive discussions of other things. A segment on a gigantic sundial and observatory completed in 1734 at Jantar Mantar (pictured), near Jaipur, for instance, sets up a discussion on the contributions of Christian, Hindu and Islamic scientists to Indian astronomy in the 18th century. Satellite-navigation services like GPS are collections of super-accurate, space-going clocks that provide location and timekeeping data for everyone from high-frequency financial traders and electricity grids to mountaineers and lorry-drivers. But they were invented to wage war, providing reliable position fixes for American soldiers and allowing what one official describes as “a humanitarian bombing system”. Knowing the time, in other words, permits you to “hit what you’re trying to hit and not hit what you aren’t trying to hit”—in theory, at least.

Sometimes Mr Rooney’s piecemeal approach is captivating. A chapter on how time came to be standardised is particularly illuminating. Before electricity and radio offered a convenient way to synchronise timekeeping, the time in one town could be noticeably different from the time in the next. The commonly accepted version of the story holds that it was the spread of railways, with their need to synchronise schedules, that forced countries to settle on a single time. But Mr Rooney recounts how he and a friend unearthed evidence suggesting that, in Britain at least, Victorian licensing laws that regulated pub opening hours were just as important in putting paid to “local time” as they required every pub in the land to know when to bring the evening’s drinking to a halt.

A running theme of the book is resentment of the order imposed on ordinary people’s lives by clocks erected by their rulers. The sentiment dates back to at least the Romans, who complained about how the easy, natural rhythms of the body and the natural world were being usurped by newfangled, tyrannical sundials and water clocks. Two millennia later, residents of industrialising Europe, whose lives were ruled by the factory clocks that marked out their working hours, made almost exactly the same complaints.

At other times, though, Mr Rooney’s approach misfires. A discussion of Jodrell Bank, a British radio observatory, and its role in the cold war, is interesting but rather disconnected from the theme of clocks and timekeeping. Segments on imperial China or the Mongol empire feel rushed and too short. And the writing might have benefited from a firmer editor, as the book feels padded in places. A steady stream of superlatives, especially in the first half, serves mostly to weaken their impact on the reader. But those are minor flaws in what is, otherwise, a diverting way to spend a few hours of precious time. ■

An early version of this article was published online on August 4th 2021

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "A matter of time"