A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [230]
By the middle of the nineteenth century it was established that all British shipping would take Greenwich as its point of reference for time and therefore for longitude, and all the oceans of the world had been mapped by British ships on that basis. As a result, the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time were increasingly widely used by the international community until, in 1884, the Washington Convention formally ratified the practice. There was one notable exception: the French defiantly stuck to their Paris Meridian for some decades more, but eventually they too fell into line, and every country now fixes its time zone by reference to Greenwich Mean Time. For the first moment in history the world was working to one timetable. Global time, a concept almost unimaginable 100 years earlier, had arrived.
But on the Beagle our chronometer was also witness to another, quite separate shift in the nineteenth century’s understanding of time. Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and his subsequent work on evolution pushed human origins – and indeed the origins of life itself – into an unthinkably distant past. Geologists had already demonstrated that the Earth was far older than previously believed, undermining the calculation made by Archbishop Ussher (see Chapter 2). This new concept of deep time – going back tens of millions of years – destroyed the established historical and biblical frameworks of thought. The shifting parameters of time and change forced the nineteenth century to rethink from scratch the very nature and meaning of human existence. Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist and expert on Darwin and evolution, considers the significance of the discovery of deep time:
I think what deep time did was to make people realize that the Earth was not unchanging. The biggest transformation since the Enlightenment has been a shift in our attitude to time, the feeling that time is effectively infinite, both the time that’s gone and the time that’s to come. It’s worth remembering that the summit of Everest, not long ago in the context of deep time, was at the bottom of the ocean; and some of the best fossils of whales are actually found high in the Himalayas.
These were enormous and belief-shattering ideas for many people in the nineteenth century, but time was also changing in a much more day-to-day, or rather hour-to-hour, way. Thanks to clockmakers like Earnshaw, precise and reliable clocks and watches became ever more affordable. Before long the whole of Britain was running by the clock, and the measurement of time had been severed from the natural cycle of days and seasons. The clock ruled every aspect of life – shops and schools, pleasure and work. As Charles Dickens wrote, ‘There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in.’ Nigel Thrift explains:
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