A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 100 OBJECTS

Surely one of the most popular books on many people’s Christmas list this year will be A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, based on his Radio 4 series of the same name. The book (and radio series) explores the history of the world and civilization via the objects that humans have made. Each of the objects is taken from the British Museum, and collectively they demonstrate how the creation, admiration, preservation, destruction, and loss of such objects can tell stories about humanity.

Object number 91 is a ship’s chronometer from HMS Beagle. As one of the world’s leading geographers and social scientists, Professor Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, contributed his expert opinion on how a brass chronometer can help explain why the world runs to Greenwich Mean Time.

In 1831 HMS Beagle set sail from Greenwich for South America on a five year voyage that would inspire the ship’s young naturalist, Charles Darwin, to write On The Origin of Species. They took with them 22 chronometers, instruments invented by Charles Harrison which could keep time despite fluctuations in movement (essential on a rolling ship), temperature and humidity. After five years, eleven of the chronometers were still working and were only thirty-three seconds out from the time they were originally set to in Greenwich.

The chronometer is the pinnacle of a long history of clockmaking, and it is very important to realize that clocks have been around since 1283 in England. Everyone talks about Harrison and the fact that he was a genius. He was, but you have to understand the innovative efforts made by hundreds and thousands of clockmakers and general mechanics that, in the end, produced that object. Gradually, all of those things are incorporated into this extraordinarily effective machine. These kinds of chronometers were phenomenally accurate; for example, one of the first was used by Captain Cook on his second voyage of exploration to the Pacific, and when Cooke made final landfall in Plymouth in 1775 after circumnavigating the globe it gave an error of less than eight miles in calculated longtitude.

“The chronometer, an exceptionally accurate clock, meant that gradually an ever more accurate measure of time became possible, and that of course worked through other things in the nineteenth century to produce ever more standardized time. A good example of that is the railway, where standard time based on the meridian was first applied by the Great Western Railway in 1840 and gradually that standard time became general. By 1855, 95 per cent of towns had switched to GMT, and by 1880 GMT became the reference point across the UK by Act of Parliament. But it is worth remembering that until that point, certainly until the beginning of railway time, places had all run to local time, and if you were travelling, Leeds, for example, was six minutes behind London; Bristol was ten minutes. It didn’t matter then. But it mattered when you started getting fast travel. Everyone went on to one time, gradually but very certainly.

By the end of the nineteenth century it was established that all British ships would set their time by Greenwich, and oceans were henceforth mapped by British ships on this basis. Both merchant and naval ships throughout the world gradually began to conform to Greenwich Mean Time, and for the first time, the whole world was working in synchronisation.

A History of the World in 100 Objects is published by Allen Lane (Penguin Books).

One of the world’s leading human geographers and social scientists, Professor Nigel Thrift has, during his academic career, been the recipient of a number of distinguished academic awards, including the Royal Geographical Society Victoria Medal for contributions to geographic research in 2003 and Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the Association of American Geographers in 2007. Prof Thrift took up his role as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick in July 2006. He joined Warwick from the University of Oxford where he was made Head of the Division of Life and Environmental Sciences in 2003 before becoming Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research in 2005.

Neil MacGregor has been Director of the British Museum since August 2002 and has devoted particular attention to developing the Museum’s regional and international activities. He is Chair of the World Collections Programme – a DCMS funded initiative to establish partnerships between six major cultural institutions in the UK and institutions in Asia and Africa. In his current and his previous role as Director of the National Gallery, Neil worked closely with BBC radio and television to bring the collections to the widest possible public. In 1981, he became editor of the arts periodical The Burlington Magazine and in 1987 became Director of the National Gallery.

By Alex Dziegiel