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Book Cover
E-book
Author Johnston, Scott Alan, author.

Title The clocks are telling lies : science, society, and the construction of time / Scott Alan Johnston
Published Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2022]
©2022

Copies

Description 1 online resource : illustrations
Contents Uneasy beginnings -- Amateurs, professionals, and eccentrics -- The International Meridian Conference -- "The House That Jack Built": Selling time, constructing modernities -- Teaching time, using time -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Resolutions passed by the IMC
Summary "Until the nineteenth century all time was local time. On foot or on horseback, it was impossible to travel fast enough to care that noon was a few minutes earlier or later from one town to the next. The invention of railways and telegraphs, however, created a newly interconnected world where suddenly the time differences between cities mattered. The Clocks Are Telling Lies is an exploration of why we tell time the way we do, demonstrating that organizing a new global time system was no simple task. Standard time, envisioned by railway engineers such as Sandford Fleming, clashed with universal time, promoted by astronomers. When both sides met at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, in 1884 to debate the best way to organize time, disagreement abounded. If scientific and engineering experts could not agree, how would the public? Following some of the key players in the debate, Scott Johnston reveals how people dealt with the contradictions in global timekeeping in surprising ways - from zealots like Charles Piazzi Smyth, who campaigned for the Great Pyramid to serve as the prime meridian, to Maria Belville, who sold the time door to door in Victorian London, to Moraviantown and other Indigenous communities that used timekeeping to fight for autonomy. Drawing from a wide range of primary sources, The Clocks Are Telling Lies offers a thought-provoking narrative that centres people and politics, rather than technology, in the vibrant story of global time telling."-- Provided by publisher
Analysis American
Annie Maunder
British
Canadian history
Charles Piazzi Smyth
Cleveland Abbe
George Airy
Greenwich
Indigenous
John Couch Adams
Kikuchi Dairoku
Martial Bourdin
Ruth Belville
Sandford Fleming
Simon Newcomb
William Allen
William Chistie
William Parker Snow
astronomy
business
computers
day
daylight savings
diplomacy
global
great pyramid
history
international meridian conference
local time
longitude
metric system
prime meridian
railway time
royal observatory
science
standard
technology
time-sense
time
timekeeping
transit venus
universal
zones
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on January 10, 2022)
Subject Time -- Systems and standards -- History
Time -- Social aspects -- History
Horology -- History
Time measurements -- History
Clocks and watches -- History
SCIENCE / History.
Clocks and watches
Horology
Time measurements
Time -- Social aspects
Time -- Systems and standards
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780228009641
0228009642
9780228009634
0228009634