IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022 - 18

Book Review
time, Ruth and others changed the habits of society
and how they came to live their lives around the
clock-and, in particular, their sleep habits.
The second vignette titled " A Distant Sleep " elaborates
on the change in sleep habits brought about
by accurate clocks. The author claims that our distant
ancestors slept differently than we do today:
" Before the Industrial Revolution, our ancestors slept
at night in two separate intervals. " The industrial revolution
changed our sleep habits by introducing artificial
lights and by the desire for punctuality brought
about by accurate clocks. Our ancestors were used
to waking in the middle of the night for several hours
to read or write without concern for getting up early
in the morning, but now people who wake up for
several hours in the middle of the night believe they
have a sleep disorder. This vignette ends by pointing
out that Arnold the watch was part of an old tradition
for the telling of the time that goes back to antiquity.
The third vignette titled " Benjamin Huntsman's
Clocks " focuses on how Arnold the clock came to be.
It started with Benjamin Huntsman, a watchmaker in
Epworth, U.K., who was dissatisfied with the quality
of watches he made. Small clocks use a combination
of a metal spiral spring and a balance wheel, and the
difficult part of making an accurate pocket watch
involved the quality of the spring. It had to be " flexible
and flawless, inhaling and exhaling steadily. " However,
the springs were made of blister steel manufactured by
heating iron and infusing carbon by surrounding the
heated but unmelted metal with charcoal. Thus, the
metal and carbon were not evenly mixed and contained
unwanted impurities. Benjamin got the idea of
melting the metal, mixing the metal and carbon uniformly,
and also decided to skim off the lighter impurities
that rose to the top. After working with the mixture
for over ten years, Huntsman's invention made for
better watches, ones that could be hung on the wall
or carried through London to provide time, like Ruth
Belville's pocket watch, Arnold.
This vignette ends by pointing out that near the end
of Belville's career, in 1939, another type of clock was
installed in a window of a building at 195 Broadway in
Manhattan that was occupied by AT&T. In the vignette
titled " Gems that Jiggle, " we are told about an unusual
3-foot clock that was often visited by New Yorkers
between noon and 2:00 p.m. to set their watches.
This unique clock kept time by using a quartz crystal.
Crystal oscillators literally changed the world. This all
began with the discovery of piezoelectricity in quartz
18
by the Curie brothers in 1880. The idea of the quartz
clock came from the quartz oscillator used in AT&T
radio station WEAF for precise frequency control.
The author does not mention Walter Guyton Cady, a
professor at Wesleyan University, who was the first to
invent the quartz crystal oscillator, in 1921. A few years
later, Warren Marrison at Bell Labs used the crystal
oscillator to solve the problem of a precise frequency
control for radio applications. After his success with
the application to radio, Marrison had the idea of
vibrating the crystal oscillator to produce a known
number of vibrations per second and then counting
the vibrations to use it as a " measuring stick " of time.
The frequency of a quartz oscillator is determined by
the cut and size of the crystal. By 1927, Marrison had
his crystal clock, which was so successful that New
Yorkers could call ME7-1212 to get the precise time.
The final vignette addressing the subject of materials
that improved the accuracy of timekeeping is
titled " Albert and Louis, " but it has nothing to do with
the science of materials. So, who is Albert, who is
Louis, and what do they have to do with time? Albert
is Albert Einstein and he is the one who theorized
that time was elastic, which is to say it was different
for observers on different platforms that had different
speeds. The author explains how Einstein began
to formulate the theory of special relativity while a
patent clerk in Bern. She also gives an example of a
conundrum of space and time using an example of
two observers, one on a moving train and one on a
platform. Einstein was fond of using the moving train
as an example to explain the puzzle that led him to
develop his theory (see Einstein Defiant by Bolles).
The " Louis " in the title was Louis Armstrong. He was
known for introducing syncopation into music, where
the length and strength of the musical notes varied,
supplanting the concept of a constant beat. These two
examples have to do with the elasticity of time rather
than the precision of timekeeping. The author then
points out that the perception of time as measured by
the brain often depends on the mood. The difference
in the perception of time has been memorialized by
idioms such as " time flies " when you are having fun,
and " time crawls " when you are bored.
Ramirez ends the chapter on time by alluding to
the first vignette: " After decades of service of bringing
time to Londoners, Ruth retired. In 1943, Ruth
Belville, the Greenwich Time Lady, died accidentally
from her gas lamp turned to a low setting. On
her nightstand was Arnold, her trusted companion,
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022

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