25 highlights
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As these bells chime, A door to the right of the seated Emperor opens and seven, ornately clothed worthies troop out, circling the Emperor turning to view him as they pass; he in turn blesses them with his sceptre. They disappear through a door on the left only to appear once again on through the door on the right. The worthies circle the Emperor three times and then the display is over for another day.
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In 1356, the then Holy Roman Emperor, Karl IV, issued the so-called Golden Bull whilst holding court in the Imperial City of Nürnberg. This document became the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire and amongst many other laws it contains the rules for the election of the emperor and names the seven Kurfürsten (English Electors), who are appointed to carry out this task
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In 1506, the city council of Nürnberg ordered the construction of the clock to celebrate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the issuing of the Golden Bull
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Built in the façade of one on Nürnberg’s most prominent churches it symbolises the bond between Church and state; the Holy Roman Emperor was traditionally crowned by the pope.
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Lastly, the clock itself and the man holding the sundial symbolise Nürnberg’s status as Europe’s premium manufacturer of scientific instruments.
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Whilst this is true for some aspects, the Golden Bull for example, it is actually so that there is nothing really unique in the Nürnberger Frauenkirche clock’s political, social, religious, and commercial symbolism. Timepieces have almost always fulfilled these varied symbolic roles and historian of time David Rooney has written an excellent book detailing the symbolic functions of clocks down the ages from antiquity to the present, his About Time: A History of Civilisation in Twelve Clocks.
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The book has twelve chapters each one of which deals with a social, cultural, commercial, or political aspect of human existence that is effected or influenced or controlled or dictated or dominated by the measuring of the passage of time, described by a single word title.
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Having introduced his exemplary timepiece and explained how it produces the social effect described by the chapter’s title word, he then goes on to described other similar timepieces that fulfil the same function.
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Having set up the concept of a clock as a symbol of religious devotion Rooney takes us on a tour of other Islamic devotional clocks, then moving on to timepieces used to mark the passage of time in Jewish, Sikh and Buddhist religious practice.
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My Nürnberg clock is a direct descendent of these awe-inspiring creations. We then trace the development of the modern mechanical clock out of these medieval marvels and the concept of time controlling the lives of upstanding people.
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This is not just a book about time and timekeeping but also about the author’s lifelong journey to an understanding of time and the role that it has played in human existence.
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So where does time lord Rooney take us in his time machine narrative? We set off in chapter one, Order, in ancient Rome in 263 BC and the introduction of the sundial into Roman culture and the dictate of order that measured time brought to that culture.
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Chapter two, Faith, as we have already seen shows the concept of time as imbodied in religions.
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Chapter three, Virtue, explains, amongst other things, how the hourglass became a symbol for virtue in the Middle Ages.
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In chapter four, Markets, we spring into the seventeenth century and the birth of the stock exchanges closely followed by the stock exchange clock, to regulate the periods when share dealing was permitted.
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Astronomical Knowledge is the theme of chapter five, and the observatories that were built to obtain that knowledge.
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Chapter six takes into the world of Empires and the elaborate time signals–time balls, midday cannons etc.–that the rulars of empire installed all over the globe, in the nineteenth century to give accurate time to their marine fleets, so that they could navigate on the high seas.
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We enter the world of Manufacture in chapter seven and in particular the world of clock manufacture in the modern period. Here Rooney traces how and why the market dominance changed from European country to European country over time.
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Chapter eight tackles Morality starting with the introduction of an electric time system in Brno at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is an introduction to the beginnings of rigorous time standardisation throughout the world.
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Chapter nine, Resistance, deals with the pushbacks against the dictates of time that have flared up from time to time throughout history.
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Chapter ten, Identity, tells the story of TIM, the British talking clock, and the fascinating story of how TIM’s voice was selected in a nationwide casting competition
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Chapter eleven, War, brings a very central theme of human existence or perhaps those attempts to end that existence and a very modern application of time the invention of GPS.
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GPS is in essence nothing more and nothing less that a network of very accurate clocks.
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Chapter twelve, Peace, takes the reader into the future and into the realm of clocks designed and built to still function millennia from now, as time capsules, a message to our descendants, should we actually still have any.
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This is not a book for specialist historians of science and technology, who however can read this book and gain much in doing so, but a book for everyone, who in interested in the relationship between the human species and time and how it got to where it is, and that should actually be everyone.