History of Clocks and Telling Time

The twentieth century's need for national and global time was a problem of electromagnetism. It became an abstraction (as relativity) out of these practical and commercial concerns.

Understanding Harrison's clocks is essential to understanding how we got from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and our own Modern age. The story of John Harrison's attempts to solve the Longitude Problem is a story about the changing historical consciousness of time.

Modernity didn’t just apply technologies of measuring time at more minute levels. Modernity and time measurement are bound together much more intimately.