The word clock may come from an Old French word for bell, cloche or cloque. (Though some physicists, seconded by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, like to say that time is what clocks measure.) Clocks also transmit information. And this new temporal order was sweeping civilizations across the world.” In his insightful, globe-spanning new book, About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, he sets out to show that this ancient device is neither simple nor innocent, that clocks are designed with hidden agendas and ulterior motives, and that their influence on human societies and the human psyche has been more profound than we usually imagine.ĭo we need a definition for this ubiquitous object? A clock is a device that measures time, I would say. “Romans were forced to live their lives by the clock. Plautus, a comedy writer, may have been half-kidding, but David Rooney is not. “You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial, by far the best and truest.” People have been complaining about clocks ever since. “The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours, and-yes-who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits,” wrote Plautus. When the first public sundial arrived in Rome, a trophy of war expropriated from Sicily in the third century BCE and mounted in the Forum for all to see, some Romans cursed it. And don’t say time “marches on.” We march on.

It cannot see you it has always been blind to the human and the things we do to stave it off, the taxonomies, the cleaning, the arranging, the ordering.Īnd the clocks! The clocks, especially-they promise control, efficiency, or even power, but time doesn’t care. Time would not care if you fell out of it. Time is impassive, more animal than human.

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