2010-10-11
14 分钟Thank you for downloading this episode of A History of the World in 100 Objects from BBC Radio 4.
In our history of the world told through things, we've now entered the long 19th century.
The years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914.
Years in which Western Europe and America were transformed from agricultural societies into industrial powerhouses.
This week's programs track some of the extraordinary changes that resulted.
New technologies led for the first time to mass production of luxury goods.
Societies reorganized themselves politically at home, while overseas, empires expanded to secure raw materials and new markets.
This program is about time, and our object is a clock.
A marine chronometer made around 1800.
But the point of this clock wasn't so much to tell you the time as to tell you where you were.
The pips that announce the passing of the hours on Radio 4 are the familiar sound of Greenwich Mean Time.
And the story of our chronometer is intimately connected to Greenwich.
It explains why, in one crucial sense, the world divides here,
and why every part of the world measures its time
and defines its position in relation to this Southeast London suburb.
In a lot of accounts, what you find is people saying that actually the Industrial Revolution fuels exact timekeeping.
But I'd argue it's exact timekeeping that in part fuels the Industrial Revolution.
So this object is really, I say, considerably more important than the landing on the moon, let's say.
A History of the World in 100 Objects.
Ship's chronometer from HMS Beagle.