consisting of twelve thirty-day months would consist thereby of 31,104,000 seconds, I have then, in fact, lived (since I am approaching my thirty-sixth year) but 1,088,640,000 seconds.
— Glenn Gould
When I was a child our family camped every summer in the wilds of northern Ontario. They were idyllic months, canoeing by day and setting up camp in the late afternoon, on an island in the middle of a lake to avoid the mosquitoes that were thicker on the mainland shores. Most of these lakes were so pure you could dip your cup in them and drink. The weather was usually sunny, but on hot afternoons, convection storms would build and cruise over the landscape—brooding cloud-towers with lightning at their bases. Inevitably there were occasional night storms, some of which were terrifically violent. A sleeping bag and a canvas tent don’t feel like much protection in a severe lightning storm, and my father, to allay my fears, taught me how to calculate how far away the storm wasby timing the thunderclaps. You just count the seconds between flash and thunder. Five seconds equalled a mile. For “seconds” we counted out “steamboats,” stopping as soon as we heard the thunder.
Sometimes the storm would miss us, never getting closer than four steamboats, but more often the storm would score almost a direct hit. It was hard to concentrate on counting when the tent was flapping in the wind and the rain drummed down so hard that it sounded like the campsite was being washed away. It was even more difficult to concentrate when there was no delay between the brilliant violet flash of lightning and the bedrock-shaking explosion of thunder. But as the first steamboats began to emerge between the flashes and the thunder, I knew, to my relief, that the storm was finally leaving.
Years later I discovered that not only could you tell how far away the lightning was, you could also, using the same method, map out the lightning branches, particularly the horizontal ones that run parallel to the ground. Now when I hear thunder begin, especially the low, rippling thunder from deep in the clouds, I start counting, and by timing the length of the thunder’s peal I can calculate the length of the lightning branch. Sometimes they are more than a mile long. Using time to measure phenomena is precisely why accurate timepieces became a necessity, and why the second, something that is now so ubiquitous in our vocabulary and experience, was also necessary to quantify.
It turned out that the relationship between time and space, or in this case time zones and longitude, became the incentive to begin measuring precise seconds, and it fell to a carpenter from Yorkshire named John Harrison to devise a clock that could measure them. By the early eighteenth century, Britain was a maritime superpower in command of thousands of oceangoing ships. The difficulty of determining accurate position at sea was one of the greatest dilemmas facing the nation. Faulty navigation led to the loss of ships, lives and valuable cargo, and as moreand more ships plied the sea, the losses mounted. It took the great maritime disaster of 1707 to galvanize England into action. Four Royal Navy ships sailed off course near the coast of the Scilly Isles and ran aground, costing the lives of fourteen hundred sailors. In an act of Parliament in 1714 Britain offered a price of £20,000 (equivalent to US $7 million today) to anyone who could accurately calculate longitude at sea.
Determining latitude had always been easy for sailors. By measuring the angle of the Pole Star and referring to an almanac of sun and star positions, they could judge their latitude exactly. But longitude posed another problem. To measure that you had to have an accurate clock, because you had to subtract your local time from the time at the prime meridian, which runs through Greenwich. A reckoning accurate within a minute would give you your position to within a mile. But there were no clocks capable of doing
— Glenn Gould
When I was a child our family camped every summer in the wilds of northern Ontario. They were idyllic months, canoeing by day and setting up camp in the late afternoon, on an island in the middle of a lake to avoid the mosquitoes that were thicker on the mainland shores. Most of these lakes were so pure you could dip your cup in them and drink. The weather was usually sunny, but on hot afternoons, convection storms would build and cruise over the landscape—brooding cloud-towers with lightning at their bases. Inevitably there were occasional night storms, some of which were terrifically violent. A sleeping bag and a canvas tent don’t feel like much protection in a severe lightning storm, and my father, to allay my fears, taught me how to calculate how far away the storm wasby timing the thunderclaps. You just count the seconds between flash and thunder. Five seconds equalled a mile. For “seconds” we counted out “steamboats,” stopping as soon as we heard the thunder.
Sometimes the storm would miss us, never getting closer than four steamboats, but more often the storm would score almost a direct hit. It was hard to concentrate on counting when the tent was flapping in the wind and the rain drummed down so hard that it sounded like the campsite was being washed away. It was even more difficult to concentrate when there was no delay between the brilliant violet flash of lightning and the bedrock-shaking explosion of thunder. But as the first steamboats began to emerge between the flashes and the thunder, I knew, to my relief, that the storm was finally leaving.
Years later I discovered that not only could you tell how far away the lightning was, you could also, using the same method, map out the lightning branches, particularly the horizontal ones that run parallel to the ground. Now when I hear thunder begin, especially the low, rippling thunder from deep in the clouds, I start counting, and by timing the length of the thunder’s peal I can calculate the length of the lightning branch. Sometimes they are more than a mile long. Using time to measure phenomena is precisely why accurate timepieces became a necessity, and why the second, something that is now so ubiquitous in our vocabulary and experience, was also necessary to quantify.
It turned out that the relationship between time and space, or in this case time zones and longitude, became the incentive to begin measuring precise seconds, and it fell to a carpenter from Yorkshire named John Harrison to devise a clock that could measure them. By the early eighteenth century, Britain was a maritime superpower in command of thousands of oceangoing ships. The difficulty of determining accurate position at sea was one of the greatest dilemmas facing the nation. Faulty navigation led to the loss of ships, lives and valuable cargo, and as moreand more ships plied the sea, the losses mounted. It took the great maritime disaster of 1707 to galvanize England into action. Four Royal Navy ships sailed off course near the coast of the Scilly Isles and ran aground, costing the lives of fourteen hundred sailors. In an act of Parliament in 1714 Britain offered a price of £20,000 (equivalent to US $7 million today) to anyone who could accurately calculate longitude at sea.
Determining latitude had always been easy for sailors. By measuring the angle of the Pole Star and referring to an almanac of sun and star positions, they could judge their latitude exactly. But longitude posed another problem. To measure that you had to have an accurate clock, because you had to subtract your local time from the time at the prime meridian, which runs through Greenwich. A reckoning accurate within a minute would give you your position to within a mile. But there were no clocks capable of doing
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