Technology and Culture

On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping By Ken Mondschein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. 256.

In this synthesis, the medievalist and public intellectual Ken Mondschein presents a history of the development of Western timekeeping in relation to the history of astronomy. He takes readers through an engaging and well-informed account of how and why abstract time-reckoning and time-keeping developed. While it might sound like oft-tread ground, Mondschein's approach brings to life the long history of Western timekeeping's many artifacts, objects, and treatises, informed by a firm grasp of how as its foundations shifted, so did its goals and achievements. Though the book does not present new research, it does develop new perspectives with its close look at the relationship between scientific breakthroughs, especially in astronomy and time-keeping technologies.

The book begins with ancient astronomers and philosophers who wished to chart the earth's movement among the stars, then turns to medieval communities living in monasteries and cities who sought social coordination through the use of bells and clocks. The desire for accurate calendars and reliable clocks of late-medieval astronomers like Copernicus and Galileo fomented calendar reform and technological innovations that improved timekeeping's accuracy, such as the pendulum, various types of escapements, and spring-drives. Along with this apparent harnessing of time through technological innovations, emerged Newton's absolute time. The title of the fourth chapter, "Navigators and Regulators," sums up the book's cause-and-effect argument regarding the origins of chronometers (the most accurate timekeepers) and standardized time. The book closes with an account of how Einstein's relative time upended previous philosophical and scientific conceptions of time, but somehow rather than dislodging habits of timekeeping dependent on clocks and calendars, encouraged improvements in time-measurement and timekeeping. Even though the concept of relativity gained adherents, no technologies developed to engrave relative time into the social fabric. Today, perhaps relative time-keeping has arrived due to the emergence of technologies that enable asynchronous action in a highly coordinated world.

The book is beautifully organized and composed. Insets answer questions such as "The Invention of the Mechanical Clock in China?", "What Happened to Arabic Timekeeping?", and "Computing the Age of the World." The appendix includes hands-on exercises designed to help readers understand the development of several sets of ideas and instruments related to timekeeping, such as the sundial, astrolabe, and the pendulum. [End Page 599] The glossary, largely devoted to technological terms, includes entries for "Millennialism" and "Ptolemaic" in addition to ones for "balance wheel" and "virge and foliot escapement." Each chapter opens with an engaging account that sets up its argument and narrative. We learn about the first century BCE's Antikythera mechanism, its hand-cut wheels demonstrating that ancient Greeks wished to keep time and knew how to do so; Frére Jacques, who rang the bells of Paris in a children's song; and Galileo's water clock. Charming and well-told stories leaven the complex, yet accessible, explanations. So we learn about how a British admiral who perished in a shipwreck due to faulty navigation motivated the British Crown to offer a reward for a reliable seafaring timekeeper, and about one of the contenders for the prize, Nevil Maskelyne, whose ideas were fundamental for establishing standardized time and time zones.

In all, the book is first-rate. It is very strong in the history of ideas and technologies; less so, while still not bad at all, in the history of society. The "Time, Industrialism, and Society" section oversimplifies the social and cultural impact of innovations in timekeeping technologies and new scientific, philosophical, and religious ideas about the meaning and nature of time. Nevertheless, due to its capable and clear explanation of complex ideas and developments in the history of Western timekeeping, On Time would be a great text for courses on the history of science or technology, or for a course on the history of time and timekeeping. It is...