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Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-century Timekeeping in America Bartky, Ian Hardcover - 2000
by Ian Bartky
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Description
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Details
- Title Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-century Timekeeping in America Bartky, Ian
- Author Ian Bartky
- Binding Hardcover
- Edition First edition
- Condition Used - Good
- Pages 328
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Stanford University Press, U.S.A.
- Date 2000-08-01
- Illustrated Yes
- Features Illustrated, Index
- Bookseller's Inventory # Box345/MG2/30/03/2023
- ISBN 9780804738743 / 0804738742
- Weight 1.79 lbs (0.81 kg)
- Dimensions 10.22 x 7.28 x 0.99 in (25.96 x 18.49 x 2.51 cm)
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Themes
- Chronological Period: 19th Century
- Library of Congress subjects Time - Systems and standards - United States
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 99086739
- Dewey Decimal Code 389.170
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From the rear cover
The story begins in the 1830s with the building of the first railroads. Since railway safety depended upon maintaining the temporal separation of trains through precise timing, railroads were the first to establish time standards to govern their operations. The railroads' switch to five time standards indexed to the Greenwich meridian inaugurated the modern era of public timekeeping and led directly to cities adopting Greenwich-indexed civil time zones.
Central to the story are those college and university astronomers who, starting in the 1850s, sold time signals to nearby cities and railroads. From the start, they competed with other entrepreneurs trying to make money by selling time. Decades of negotiations, government lobbying, and battles over customers followed, all in the name of "public service." Improvements by a host of clockmakers, civil and electrical engineers, telegraph and railway technicians, and instrument makers finally changed the market for accurate time. Public timekeeping became the realm of business investors.
Despite the efforts of astronomers and various of their Congressional supporters, who argued for the necessity of a national system of time authorized by the federal government, the railroads' success with their own system blocked legislation for a national system of time until the First World War. By then, a single source for correct time dominated the public's timekeeping: the U.S. Naval Observatory's noon signal.
In this first comprehensive, scholarly history of timekeeping in America, the author has drawn upon a rich, untapped archival record, municipal and legislative documents, newspapers, and science and engineering journals to challenge several myths that have grown up around the subject.
Media reviews
Citations
- Choice, 02/01/2001, Page 1102
- Library Journal, 07/01/2000, Page 131
- Publishers Weekly, 07/10/2000, Page 0
- Reference and Research Bk News, 02/01/2001, Page 200
- Scitech Book News, 12/01/2000, Page 44