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Author: Ian R. Bartky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781503618701
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
This book studies the transition from local to national timekeeping, a process that led to Standard Time--the world-wide system of timekeeping by which we all live. Prior to the railroads' adoption of Standard Railway Time in 1883, timekeeping was entirely a local matter, and America lacked any uniform system to coordinate times and public activities. For example, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Boston had three authoritative times, which differed by seconds and minutes. 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.
Author: Ian R. Bartky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781503618701
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Get Book
Book Description
This book studies the transition from local to national timekeeping, a process that led to Standard Time--the world-wide system of timekeeping by which we all live. Prior to the railroads' adoption of Standard Railway Time in 1883, timekeeping was entirely a local matter, and America lacked any uniform system to coordinate times and public activities. For example, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Boston had three authoritative times, which differed by seconds and minutes. 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.
Author: Ian R. Bartky
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804738743
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
This first comprehensive, scholarly history of timekeeping in America studies the transition from local to national timekeeping, a process that led to Standard Time—the worldwide system of timekeeping by which we all live. The book describes the contributions of the railroad industry, university astronomers, clockmakers, and civil and electrical engineers.
Author: Dava Sobel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802779433
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem." Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution-a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world.
Author: Todd D Rakoff
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042522
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Sunday is more like Monday than it used to be. The Fourth of July is more like the third. Although time is a feature of the natural world, it is at the same time not natural, but given its meaning by human action and, in our contemporary world, primarily through the law. Rakoff argues that legal regulation of the law has become weaker, with unfortunate results for both individuals and families.
Author: Alexis McCrossen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022601486X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks, and expands our understanding of the ways we have standardized time and have made timekeepers serve as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that not merely values time, but regards access to it as a natural-born right.
Author: Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421429748
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Complicating the existing scholarship by demonstrating that the railroad and telegraph in the United States were uneasy partners at best—and more often outright antagonists—throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, The Train and the Telegraph will appeal to scholars of communication, transportation, and American business history and political economy, as well as to enthusiasts of the nineteenth-century American railroad industry.
Author: Sherman Alexie
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448188563
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
An all-new edition of the tragicomic smash hit which stormed the New York Times bestseller charts, now featuring an introduction from Markus Zusak. In his first book for young adults, Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist who leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white high school. This heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written tale, featuring poignant drawings that reflect the character's art, is based on the author's own experiences. It chronicles contemporary adolescence as seen through the eyes of one Native American boy. 'Excellent in every way' Neil Gaiman Illustrated in a contemporary cartoon style by Ellen Forney.
Author: Steven J. Dick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521815994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 636
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Book Description
As one of the oldest scientific institutions in the United States, the US Naval Observatory has a rich and colourful history. This volume is, first and foremost, a story of the relations between space, time and navigation, from the rise of the chronometer in the United States to the Global Positioning System of satellites, for which the Naval Observatory provides the time to a billionth of a second per day. It is a story of the history of technology, in the form of telescopes, lenses, detectors, calculators, clocks and computers over 170 years. It describes how one scientific institution under government and military patronage has contributed, through all the vagaries of history, to almost two centuries of unparalleled progress in astronomy. Sky and Ocean Joined will appeal to historians of science, technology, scientific institutions and American science, as well as astronomers, meteorologists and physicists.
Author: Charles W. J. Withers
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674978951
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Charles Withers explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0° longitude solved problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times. This history is a testament to the power of maps, the challenges of global measurement, and the role of scientific authority in creating the modern world.
Author: Jürgen Osterhammel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691169802
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1192
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Book Description
A panoramic global history of the nineteenth century A monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudition. He examines the powerful and complex forces that drove global change during the "long nineteenth century," taking readers from New York to New Delhi, from the Latin American revolutions to the Taiping Rebellion, from the perils and promise of Europe's transatlantic labor markets to the hardships endured by nomadic, tribal peoples across the planet. Osterhammel describes a world increasingly networked by the telegraph, the steamship, and the railways. He explores the changing relationship between human beings and nature, looks at the importance of cities, explains the role slavery and its abolition played in the emergence of new nations, challenges the widely held belief that the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the nation-state, and much more. This is the highly anticipated English edition of the spectacularly successful and critically acclaimed German book, which is also being translated into Chinese, Polish, Russian, and French. Indispensable for any historian, The Transformation of the World sheds important new light on this momentous epoch, showing how the nineteenth century paved the way for the global catastrophes of the twentieth century, yet how it also gave rise to pacifism, liberalism, the trade union, and a host of other crucial developments.
