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About Time

About Time

A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks

Summary

'An utterly dazzling book, the best piece of history I have read for a long time' Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps

'Not merely an horologist's delight, but an ingenious meditation on the nature and symbolism of time-keeping itself' Richard Holmes

The measurement of time has always been essential to human civilization, from early Roman sundials to the advent of GPS. But while we have one eye on the time every day, are we aware of the power clocks have given governments, military leaders and business owners, and how they have shaped our lives and our world?

In this spectacularly far-reaching book, David Rooney narrates a history of timekeeping and civilization in twelve concise chapters. Over their course, we meet the most epochal inventions in horological history, from medieval water clocks to Renaissance hourglasses, and from stock-exchange timestamps to satellites in Earth's orbit. We discover how clocks have helped people navigate the globe and build empires, but also, on occasion, taken us to the brink of destruction.

This is the story of time, and the story of time is the story of us.

Reviews

  • 'About Time is an utterly dazzling book, the best piece of history I have read for a long time. From sundials in ancient Rome to astronomical, water-driven, mechanical and atomic timepieces used throughout history and across cultures, Rooney has written the definitive book on these remarkable objects that give order to everyday life. It is a moving and beautifully written book that even takes us 5,000 years into the future with plutonium clocks ticking away beneath our feet. There will be many puns about this as a timely book; in fact, it is timeless'
    Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps

About the author

David Rooney

David Rooney is a British historian and museum curator. He was born in northeast England in 1974 to parents who ran a noted clock restoration business. He moved to London in 1995 to take a traineeship at the Science Museum, where he encountered – and was later responsible for – the aeroplane that won the Big Hop contest.

Over an almost thirty-year museum career, David has specialized in bringing historical stories vividly alive. As the Science Museum’s Keeper of Technology and Engineering, he led a team of ten specialist curators with combined responsibility for one-third of the museum’s vast collection and oversaw internationally significant artefacts ranging from art and aeronautics to space technology and nuclear power.


Among the exhibitions David curated was the critically acclaimed 2012 retrospective of the mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing. David also curated the museum’s RIBA-award-winning mathematics gallery, designed by Dame Zaha Hadid, which opened in December 2016 and was widely commended.
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