It is peaceful on this hilltop. In front of me, ships, mostly dinner-dance cruises for American tourists, meander along the Thames. Slightly to the left, I can see the National Maritime Museum. To the right, in the very far distance, is the Millennium Dome. And right under my feet is one of the most important and arbitrary places of all time. Longitude Zero. Home of the beginning and end of Greenwich Mean Time.
Time. It seems firm enough. Sixty seconds make a minute. Sixty minutes an hour. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. And then it all starts to break down. Twenty–eight to 31 days a month. Oh, and twice a year, we move the clocks either forward or back. Unless you live in certain parts of Indiana and Hawaii. Or near a bunch of petulant Daylight Saving Time-hating farmers.
I have come to the Greenwich Observatory and the National Maritime Museum to find out why time is the way it is. According to the exhibits of timekeepers of all sorts, we started by cutting up our universe into understandable chunks. The world around us helped. There were the movements of stars, the sunrises, the sunsets, the seasons. It made sense.
The traditional Inuit calendar is divided into 13 flexible “moons.” They are called: Sun Is Possible, Sun Gets Higher, Premature Seal Pups, Seal Pup, Bearded Seal Pups, Caribou Calves, Eggs (nesting season), Caribou Hair Sheds, Caribou Hair Thickens, Velvet Pelts From Caribou Antlers, Winter Starts, Hearing News From Neighbors and the Great Darkness.
It used to be all time was as local as that. And then astronomers in less migratory civilizations got into the act (hence the Observatory). By watching equinoxes, the length of a year was more or less determined. The year was cut into moons, or months. Which were cut into moon phases, or weeks. By the time the Jewish calendar came into being, our seven-day week was decided. We can blame the Babylonians and their peculiar but ingenious number systems based on 24 and 60 for hours and minutes .
Which is where it stood for millennia, with a little readjusting every now and then. (For example, in 1752, Great Britain and its colonies jumped from Sept. 2 to Sept. 14 overnight as it adjusted to the Gregorian calendar. Predictably, many landlords insisted on being paid for the missing days.)
Within Europe, most villages would set their clocks to noon when the sun passed over their meridian (which meant that, due to mechanical and/or human error, at one point the time difference between London and Brighton, which is virtually due south, was 20 minutes). Some of the watches on display at the Maritime Museum have two minute hands, one for GMT and the other for local time.
To make matters more complicated, some places, such as Venice, started counting the hours of the day from sunset. Which meant noon was at about 18:00 (6 p.m.) on a 24-hour clock. But they followed the convention of putting noon at the top of the clock dial, so 18:00 is at the top of Venetian clocks. A mantelpiece example on display.
So, time was mutable. But that didn’t really matter unless you were trying to navigate across the sea by the stars or were about to launch the Industrial Revolution.
Luckily, the problem of accurate time keeping was more or less solved by the 19th Century. One of the Greenwich Observatory’s most important functions was to give accurate time to businesses and to ships passing by on their way to the colonies. By 1847, the British Railways were using GMT.
By 1880, it was the only legal time in Great Britain. Then, in 1884, at a meeting of diplomats and scientists in Washington D.C., Greenwich was declared the prime meridian of the world.
Needless to say, the French dissented. The English at the center of the world? Bah! The French were used to bending time to their desires. During the French Revolution, in 1793, they had introduced decimalized time and a new saint-free calendar. Each Revolutionary minute had 100 seconds. Each hour had 100 minutes. Each day 10 hours. There were 12 months, and each of the months was divided into three slices of 10 days each.
In an Inuit-esque move, they had also renamed their months: Grape Harvest, Fog, Frost, Snow, Rain, Wind, Budding Plants, Flowers, Meadows, Harvest, Heat and Fruit Harvest. Decimalized time lasted 13 years.
In a move to appease the French, the same meeting that determined GMT the world standard also declared: “All technical studies designed to regulate and extend the application of the decimal system shall be resumed.” As if.
Regardless, the French still kept to l’heure nationale (which was 9 minutes and 21 seconds past GMT) until they finally gave in in 1896–though they didn’t actually deign to use the word Greenwich until 1911.
But that wasn’t that. As the story goes, London builder William Willett (1865-1915) was taking an early morning bike ride through London when he noticed that, even though the sun was up, most of the blinds were closed and the people asleep.
Enraged, he put out a pamphlet called “Waste of Daylight” (1907) proposing that the clocks be advanced 20 minutes on each of four Sundays in April, and put back by the same amount on four Sundays in September. It would, he argued, save energy (not having to light the evenings) and be healthier.
Willett was ridiculed and a 1909 act of Parliament on the subject was defeated. He died in 1915.
By 1916, Germany was doing it (to help with war expenses) and the U.K. followed suit. Energy costs did drop, but farmers complained bitterly, since crops and animals don’t watch a clock. The experiment was so successful that during World War II, the U.K. went on double summer time, jet lagging an entire country in one go and giving new weight to the words “Greenwich MEAN time.”
Over the years, Daylight Saving Time became a fact of life, albeit one regularly grumbled about, especially by students losing out on a crucial hour during the end-of-year exam period. But I like it. It serves to remind me twice a year how random the laws of our society are. How fickle the things we consider certainties. And it gives me an excuse to stand here, on the top of this hill, and feel for an instant that I am at the center of it all.
IF YOU GO
THE DETAILS
The National Maritime Museum is at the heart of the extensive Maritime Greenwich UNESCO World Heritage Site. The museum compound itself includes the Royal Observatory (up on a hill behind the main building) as well as The Queen’s House, a superb 17th Century house designed by Inigo Jones for Queen Anne of Denmark (1574-1619). The museum’s collections are Imperial Britain’s attic. They include everything from 4,000 oil paintings to 1.5 miles of shelves of manuscripts to 750,000 ship plans to more than 100 boats (including the 19th Century Cutty Sark, the last surviving tea clipper of her kind, which is docked nearby). But this is not a dead and dusty place. Exhibits cover everything from slavery to global warming. Visit the Opium Wars display, and you’ll never look at a cup of tea the same way again.
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, SE10 9NF; 44-020-8858-4422; fax 44-020-8312-6632; www.nmm.ac.uk. Hours: 10 a.m.- 5p.m. Children under 16 and adults over 60 are free. Otherwise, tickets to the National Maritime Museum are about $10.65; to the NMM and the Royal Observatory (44-020-8858-4422; fax 44-020-8312-6734; www.rog.nmm.ac.uk) about $14.90, and to the NMM, the Observatory and the Cutty Sark about $17. (In early April the exchange rate was $1 U.S.=.7043 pounds; 1 pound=$1.41985.)
For astronomy inquiries, e-mail astroline@nmm.ac.uk
For more info on Britain, contact the British Tourist Authority, 800-462-2748; www.visitbritain.com
–C.P.
