¹ British Horological Institute (BHI) to Royal Observatory, 22 July 1879, Royal Greenwich Observatory Archives, University Library, Cambridge, file RGO 7/252, ‘Clocks not R.O. From 1881’ (subsequently RGO 7/252).

² Traditional accounts of time standardization and distribution in Britain, focusing on linear progress, include D. Howse, Greenwich Time and the Longitude, revised edn, London, 2001; and A. J. Meadows, Greenwich Observatory, Volume 2 (‘Recent History’) of Greenwich Observatory (ed. E. G. Forbes), London, 1975. A. Chapman, ‘Standard time for all: the electric telegraph, Airy, and the Greenwich Time Service’, in Semaphores to Short Waves (ed. Frank James), London, 1998, 40–59, gives a technical account of the early history of electric time distribution from the Royal Observatory. Airy's own account is the principal focus and the picture that emerges suggests that the technology was largely unproblematic, reliable and taken up very quickly. There are therefore interesting contrasts to be made with the picture unravelled in the narrative discourse (particularly between the GPO and the Standard Time Company) which is one focus of this paper. This tends to suggest a more contested situation.

³ Examples include Gay, H., ‘Clock synchrony, time distribution and electrical timekeeping in Britain, 1880–1925’, Past and Present (2003), 181, 107–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morus, I., ‘The nervous system of Britain: space, time and the electric telegraph in the Victorian age’, BJHS (2000), 33, 455–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; C. Homes, ‘The Astronomer Royal, the Hydrographer and the Time Ball: collaborations in time signalling 1850–1910’, unpublished M.Sc. dissertation, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial College, London, September 2005. Coverage of time standardization around the globe varies. In the wake of the popularization of the Harrison story by D. Sobel, the novelist C. Blaise chose Sandford Fleming as a subject, mainly focusing on time in North America. His book, Time Lord, London, 2000, suggests that standardization happened overnight and that new technologies simply swept away old ones. His book has attracted substantial criticism from I. Bartky, whose One Time Fits All, Stanford, 2007, offers a closely researched and detailed history of the same period, addressing the full complexity of the story. For Europe and especially Switzerland, P. Galison, in Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, London, 2003, situates time synchronization within the field of relativity and demonstrates how critical models and machines were to Einstein's thinking. It avoids progressivist pitfalls and considers time standardization in broad cultural contexts. Turning to the southern hemisphere, G. Davison, The Unforgiving Minute, Melbourne, 1993, is a wide-ranging analysis of the Australian situation.

⁴ Throughout this paper the name Standard Time Company has been used, but that was not always the actual trading name of the firm. The company had a long and troubled history, trouble which necessitated the frequent changing of name and ownership. It would be unnecessarily complex to track all the different names here. See instead Nye, J. and Rooney, D., ‘“Such Great Inventors as the Late Mr. Lund”: an introduction to the Standard Time Company, 1870–1970’, Antiquarian Horology (2007), 30, 501–23Google Scholar.

⁵ For treating the history of technology as histories of use rather than invention, see Edgerton, D., ‘From innovation to use: ten eclectic theses on the historiography of technology’, History and Technology (1999), 16, 111–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, London, 2006. See also S. Lindqvist, ‘Changes in the temporal landscape: the temporal dimension in the growth and decline of large technological systems’, in Economics of Technology (ed. O. Granstrand), Amsterdam, 1994, 271–88. In such accounts, maintenance takes a prominent role, as does the shifting nature of relationships between people and things over the (long) lifetime of any technology.

⁶ Edgerton, Shock of the Old, op. cit. (5), 4.

⁷ L. Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, Cambridge, MA, 1977, 183, quoted in Edgerton, Shock of the Old, op. cit. (5), 75–6.

⁸ G. Gooday, The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice, Cambridge, 2004. Quotation on p. xx.

⁹ A useful approach regarding the duration in which technological systems remain ‘contested’ comes from W. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, Cambridge, MA, 1995, 270–1, where he discusses artefacts having multiple ‘meanings’ and ‘interpretative flexibility’ after their ‘invention’ owing to ‘social interactions between and within relevant social groups’. His term ‘closure’ refers to the process by which that flexibility decreases, meanings become less ambiguous and the artefact reaches ‘higher levels of stabilization’. In this context, the telegraph network in London had by no means reached closure in the period between 1875 and 1915, remaining, as demonstrated in this paper, ambiguous, flexible and unstable. This approach, however, still focuses on invention (or innovation) rather than use, and suggests that once closure is reached the story is over. Whilst this paper focuses on the period up to 1915, further work should be done to recover the story of electric telegraph time signals in the period from, say, 1915 to 1950, when they continued to operate, by then coexisting with alternative systems, primarily wireless signals and the use of mains power frequency.

¹⁰ S. Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They're Built, London, 1997, 2.

¹¹ T. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930, Baltimore and London, 1983, p. x.

¹² W. Vincenti, ‘Engineering knowledge, type of design, and level of hierarchy: further thoughts about What Engineers Know’, in Technical Development and Science in the Industrial Age (ed. P. Kroes and M. Bakker), Dordrecht, 1992, 17–34, 17–18, quoted in Edgerton, ‘From innovation to use’, op. cit. (5), 113.

¹³ H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, London, 1909, 109.

¹⁴ The Times, 8 January 1908, 9.

¹⁵ See Gay, op. cit. (3), for a summary of the 1908 ‘Lying Clocks’ episode reported in The Times and a survey of the landscape of ‘synchrony’ at this time. See also Rooney, D., ‘Maria and Ruth Belville: competition for Greenwich time supply’, Antiquarian Horology (2006), 29, 614–28Google Scholar, for further analysis of time supply in London in this period.

¹⁶ Robert Lecky to the president of the Royal Astronomical Society, 13 March 1879, RGO 7/252. Little has yet been found out about Lecky. According to the RAS Index of Fellows he was elected a Fellow of the RAS in 1868 but resigned in 1896; however, he was given a ‘special grant’ of Monthly Notices of the RAS, which was most unusual.

¹⁷ File POST 30/531, ‘Synchronisation Etc. of Clocks By Electric Current’, BT Archives, London (subsequently POST 30/531).

¹⁸ The Times, 15 January 1877, 12.

¹⁹ BHI to Astronomer Royal, 22 July 1879, op. cit. (1).

²⁰ George Airy to BHI, 24 July 1879, RGO 7/252.

²¹ F. C. Penrose to William Christie, 25 January 1894, RGO 7/252. According to the Post Office Directory for 1894, Richard Webster, FRAS, was a ‘chronometer maker to the Lords of the Admiralty & the East India & Colonial Governments, watch and turret, railway & office clock manufacturer’ and, like the Standard Time Company itself, used to have his premises in Cornhill but now worked in Queen Victoria Street. Access to accurate Greenwich time would have been vital to Webster's chronometer-adjusting work; a useful spin-off would be to provide it to people passing by his window.

²² Lewis (RO) for Christie, to Penrose, 31 January 1894, RGO 7/252.

²³ This only refers to the clocks in the time-signal chain. The RO's mean solar standard clock was itself corrected by reference to the standard sidereal clock, which was in turn corrected by the nightly observations of the stars through the transit telescope. Howse, op. cit. (2), treats this wonderfully complex story in more detail, and for a more scientific examination, particularly of twentieth-century timekeeping, T. Jones, Splitting the Second, Bristol, 2000, is very thorough. On the role of trust in the establishment and use of metrological standards, and the typically long time and great efforts needed for this to happen, see the essays in M. Norton Wise (ed.) The Values of Precision, Princeton, 1995. For example, K. Alder, ‘A revolution to measure: the political economy of the metric system in France’, 39–71, speaks convincingly of the cultural construction of standards, and S. Schaffer, ‘Accurate measurement is an English science’, 135–72, explores the Victorian metrological moral scene. Other essays are mentioned in separate notes.

²⁴ Newitt (STC) to Christie (RO), 31 October 1901, RGO 7/252.

²⁵ This clock remains in the collections of the Royal Observatory, and is on display – corrected hourly now by a local clock – in the Time & Greenwich gallery.

²⁶ Handwritten note on RO paper, undated, RGO 7/252.

²⁷ RO to STC, 4 November 1901, RGO 7/252.

²⁸ Newitt to RO, 17 February 1902, RGO 7/252. It may be no coincidence that STC was seeking, in 1901–2, official certification of its own standard's accuracy compared with the primary standard, for this was precisely the time when the Royal Society founded the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), in Bushy House, Teddington. A service to industry in providing testing and standards maintenance, the NPL was formally opened in 1902. Standardization for commerce and industry was clearly a pressing contemporary concern. Watch-testing for the public was carried out initially at Kew Observatory from 1884 after lobbying from the British Horological Institute, keen to see facilities for official watch tests to compete with those of America and Switzerland.

²⁹ RO to Newitt, 20 February 1902, RGO 7/252.

³⁰ See Rooney, op. cit. (15).

³¹ GPO to RO, 4 March 1901, Royal Greenwich Observatory Archives, University Library, Cambridge, file RGO 7/254, ‘Time Signals from 1889 to 1893’, subsequently RGO 7/254.

³² RO to GPO, 7 March 1901, RGO 7/254.

³³ Gooday, op. cit. (8), p. xx. On the STC automated technologies see Nye and Rooney, op. cit. (4). A. Warwick, ‘The laboratory of theory or what's exact about the exact sciences?’, in Wise, op. cit. (23), 311–51, is a fascinating study of the black-boxing of labour in the mathematical and computational world at this time.

³⁴ S. Webb, ‘Preface’ (1902), in B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation, new edn, London, 1907, p. v.

³⁵ Clearly, the history of factory legislation is a subject far too important and complex to be dealt with here at more than a cursory level. The reader is directed to the wide range of literature that exists in this field, such as Sidney Webb's own extensive writings on the subject.

³⁶ An Act to Amend the Laws Relating to Labour in Factories, 6 June 1844, section XXVI, 7 Victoria Ch. 15.

³⁷ Hutchins and Harrison, op. cit. (34), 86; emphasis added.

³⁸ M. W. Thomas, The Early Factory Legislation, Essex, 1948, 39, quoting the factories legislation bill (often called the ‘Ten Hours Bill’). Examples of ‘speed clocks’ or engine clocks are known to have survived, and usefully one such device by John Barrett of Skipton is calibrated in terms not of the twenty-four-hour clock but of its factory working hours of 6.30 a.m. to 10.00 p.m. Monday to Friday (with ninety minutes of breaks) with Saturday's shift being six hours long. A bell signalled the passing of each half-hour of ‘engine time’. Exhibited ‘Industrial Time Exhibition’, Macclesfield Silk Museum, Summer 2003. Private collection, correspondence August 2007.

³⁹ Alder, op. cit. (23), 45, referring to eighteenth-century premetric France; Hansard, XI, 1832, col. 367.

⁴⁰ Thomas, op. cit. (38), 149.

⁴¹ Factory and Workshop Act, 1901, 1 Edward VII, Ch. 22.

⁴² H. A. Mess, Factory Legislation and Its Administration, 1891–1924, London, 1926, 168.

⁴³ Webb, op. cit. (34), p. viii.

⁴⁴ Harold Cliff, secretary, Oldham Master Cotton Spinners' Association Limited, to District Manager of Telephones, S.E. Lancs District, Rochdale, 4 December 1913, POST 30/531.

⁴⁵ Rochdale district manager to the secretary in London, 18 December 1913, POST 30/531.

⁴⁶ Oldham was not the only request for such a public–private partnership; several others came from across the UK at about the same time following an announcement in the Manchester Guardian in April 1913 that the Post Office was ready to receive applications from the public to receive time signals for synchronizing clocks. However, this was an expensive solution if a business was spread over several sites, and the obvious solution in customers' minds was to have a single feed from the Post Office and then to erect their own local onward-distribution network.

⁴⁷ Rochdale district manager to the secretary in London, 15 July 1914, POST 30/531.

⁴⁸ Post Office Chief Engineer's Office to the secretary, 25 July 1914, POST 30/531.

⁴⁹ Rochdale district manager to the secretary in London, 27 August 1914, POST 30/531.

⁵⁰ For a survey of the nineteenth-century licensing legislation see S. Webb and B. Webb, The History of Liquor Licensing, London, 1903 (reprinted 1963).

⁵¹ J. Paterson, The Intoxicating Liquor Licensing Acts, 1872, 1874, London, 1894 (tenth edn), pp. ix–x.

⁵² A. E. Dingle, The Campaign for Prohibition in Victorian England, London, 1980, 8.

⁵³ The debate was not wholly acrimonious, though. ‘In the first real discussion of the Licensing Bill the House generally seemed to have caught the spirit of the subject. Description of the ruling development may be contained in a few words – the House was convivial.’ Illustrated London News, 27 July 1872, 82.

⁵⁴ The Times, 29 May 1874, 9.

⁵⁵ Sir John Kennaway was a prominent figure in the temperance movement, and it may be worth observing that the Standard Time Company's subscriber list included, as well as at least two breweries and eighty public houses, the United Kingdom Temperance & General Provident Institution, Adelaide Place, and the Devonshire House Temperance Hotel, Bishopsgate Street. The temperance movement was naturally keen to use the new regulating legislation to its greatest restrictive effect. POST 30/531.

⁵⁶ Hansard, 5 June 1874, col. 1090.

⁵⁷ Paterson, op. cit. (51), 172.

⁵⁸ ‘Curtis v. March, Nov. 25, 1858 – The time appointed for the sitting of a Court must be understood as the mean time at the place where the Court sits, and not Greenwich time, unless it be so expressed.’ The full legal summary is in The English Reports, CLVII, Exchequer Division XIII, Stevens & Sons, London, 1916, 719. That same year, Cross was completing his first year as a new Member of Parliament, and had just published a book on non-criminal law in his capacity as leader of the Preston and Salford quarter-session bar. Dorchester is broadly on the same longitude as Preston and Salford, about 10 minutes behind Greenwich.

⁵⁹ For biographical information about Cross see S. V. Fitz-Gerald, ‘Cross, Richard Assheton, first Viscount Cross (1823–1914), rev. Paul Smith, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, May 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32644, accessed 26 April 2007.

⁶⁰ Statutes (Definition of Time) Act, 1880, 43 & 44 Victoria Ch. 9 (subsequently Time Act).

⁶¹ See Rooney, op. cit. (15), for details of the Belvilles’ service.

⁶² Time Act.

⁶³ Lund, J. A., ‘On a complete system of synchronizing by electric time signals, as now adopted in London and elsewhere’, Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers and of Electricians (1881), X, 381–401, 382CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ ‘Standard Time Company Limited, Prospectus’, 1886, in POST 30/531.

⁶⁵ ‘The Post Office London Directory for 1883’, Kelly & Co., London, 1883.

⁶⁶ ‘Introduction’, in Wise, op. cit. (23), 7; original emphasis. For a wider exploration of insurance, standards and nineteenth-century cultural values see T. M. Porter, ‘Precision and trust: early Victorian insurance and the politics of calculation’, in ibid., 173–97. That O'Donoghue bought STC in 1896 is found in file PRO BT 31/49583, Board of Trade papers, National Archives, London. That O'Donoghue was the manager and secretary of the Licences Insurance Corporation and Guarantee Fund (LICGF) is found in the Post Office London Street Directory for 1896. The STC transfer documents were cosigned and submitted to the Registrar of Companies by a solicitor, Charles Durnford Greenway, whose offices were at 24 Moorgate Street. This was also the address of the LICGF, but at this stage it seems that Greenway was only a neighbour of the fund – he was certainly not their retained solicitor. The Board Minute Books of the LICGF for 1896 (Ms 16213/2, Licenses and General Insurance Company records, Guildhall Library, London) make no mention of STC or O'Donoghue's interest in it, leading one to assume that this was a private, ‘insider’ deal on O'Donoghue's part. Interestingly, Greenway later joined the staff of the LICGF – as O'Donoghue's assistant manager. See The Times, 19 March 1910, 17. The intricate web of contacts, deals and interests in this period is fascinating and so complex as to be difficult to track. The LICGF traded as Phronimos – ‘prudent’, ‘mindful of one's interests’. Clearly so.

⁶⁷ Hughes, op. cit. (11), 1.

⁶⁸ H. Eaton to secretary of the Post Office, 7 May 1883, ref. 173952, POST 30/531.

⁶⁹ Post Office to STC, 18 May 1883, POST 30/531.

⁷⁰ STC to Post Office, 21 May 1883, POST 30/531.

⁷¹ Eaton to the GPO secretary, 1 June 1883, POST 30/531.

⁷² Post Office to STC, 4 June 1883, POST 30/531.

⁷³ The Daily Telegraph, 9 November 1886, clipping in POST 30/531.

⁷⁴ ‘The Standard Time Company Limited, Prospectus’, 1886, POST 30/531.

⁷⁵ Memorandum, sender not known, to secretary of the Post Office, 10 November 1886, POST 30/531.

⁷⁶ Memorandum, sender not known, to Mr Eaton, date not known, POST 30/531.

⁷⁷ ‘The Exclusive Privileges of the Postmaster General under the Telegraph Acts’, General Post Office, undated handbill, POST 30/531.

⁷⁸ Eaton to chief engineer, 27 November 1886, POST 30/531.

⁷⁹ Secretary of the Post Office to the General Manager of the MRC, 15 December 1886, POST 30/531.

⁸⁰ MRC to Post Office, 29 December 1886, POST 30/531.

⁸¹ Solicitor to secretary, 2 March 1887, POST 30/531.

⁸² Post Office to MRC, 5 March 1887, POST 30/531.

⁸³ ‘Re. Standard Time Coy – Opinion on Case – J. Fletcher Moulton, 11 Kings Bench Walk, Temple’, 22 December 1886, POST 30/531. John Fletcher Moulton was the biggest of the big legal guns available to the MRC on this subject, being a highly prominent figure in matters of patents, invention and electrical technology (including electrical timekeeping). See T. Mathew, ‘Moulton, John Fletcher, Baron Moulton (1844–1921)’, rev. H. Mooney, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, online edn, May 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35132, accessed 7 August 2007.

⁸⁴ Memorandum, sender not known, to the secretary, 15 October 1888, POST 30/531.

⁸⁵ ‘Metropolitan Railway – As to Postmaster General's Wayleave over for Telegraphs – Copy Opinion, C. Simpson, Gold Square, Lincoln's Inn’, 29 March 1888, POST 30/531.

⁸⁶ Assistant engineer-in-chief to Post Office secretary, 22 December 1914, POST 30/531; underlining in original.

⁸⁷ B. Marsden and C. Smith, Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Basingstoke, 2005, 180.

⁸⁸ Morus, op. cit. (3), 456.

⁸⁹ Morus, op. cit. (3), 457. For more on the electric (primarily submarine) telegraph's place in Victorian society see B. Hunt, ‘Doing science in a global empire: cable telegraphy and electrical physics in Victorian Britain’, in Victorian Science in Context (ed. B. Lightman), Chicago, 1997, 312–33. For wider discussions of technology and empire see R. Kubicek, ‘British expansion, empire, and technological change’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III, The Nineteenth Century (ed. A. Porter), Oxford, 1999, 247–69.

⁹⁰ On the development of London's electric power system in this period see Hughes, op. cit. (11), 227–61. On the complex nature of the word ‘power’ see Bijker, op. cit. (9), 260–6.

⁹¹ Hughes, op. cit. (11), 240–1.

⁹² Advertisement for Woodhouse & Rawson United Limited, reproduced in J. M. MacKenzie, The Victorian Vision: Inventing New Britain, London, 2001, 167.

⁹³ D. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940, Oxford, 1988, 98.

⁹⁴ Memorandum, GPO secretary, 10 July 1916, POST 30/531.

⁹⁵ S. Schaffer, ‘Late Victorian Metrology and its instrumentation: a manufactory of ohms’, in Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions, and Science (ed. R. Bud and S. Cozzens), Washington, 1992, 23–56, 25.

⁹⁶ On STC's financial and business history see Nye and Rooney, op. cit. (4). On the Belville time service and technological choice see Rooney, op. cit. (15).

⁹⁷ Later the Institution of Electrical Engineers, now the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

⁹⁸ Lund, op. cit. (63), 381–2.

⁹⁹ D. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live with, Cambridge, MA, 2006, 76.