Today is my stop on the blog tour for My Book of Revelations by Iain Hood, published by the excellent Renard Press. As life has been manic with upcoming bookshop crawl things and I haven't finished a book in weeks, I'm going to be sharing an excerpt from the book with you today! Here is a quick synopsis of the book before you start, and because nothing is going the way it's meant to at the moment, all the lovely formatting of the excerpt has been lost in the translation to blogger, so really I just recommend you go and buy the book asap so you can read it as the author and publisher intended!
The countdown to the millennium has begun, and people are losing their heads. A so-called Y2K expert gives a presentation to Scotland’s eccentric Tech Laird T.S. Mole’s entourage in Edinburgh, and soon long hours, days, weeks and months fill with seemingly chaotic and frantic work on the ‘bug problem’. Soon enough it’ll be just minutes and seconds to go to midnight. Is the world about to end, or will everyone just wake up the next day with the same old New Year’s Day hangover?
A book about what we know and don’t know, about how we communicate and fail to, My Book of Revelations moves from historical revelations to the personal, and climaxes in the bang and flare of fireworks, exploding myths and offering a glimpse of a scandal that will rock Scotland into the twenty-first century. As embers fall silently to earth, all that is left to say is: Are we working in the early days of a better nation?
15 decades to go
By the year 1850, developments in travel and communication
made apparent that local time usage, by which all geographical
points defined noon as the time at which the sun reached its
highest point overhead, could no longer be sustained. Up
until about then, no one moved fast enough nor far enough
for time differences to matter. But, for example, the first
temporary train terminus of the Great Western Railway had
been opened at Paddington in 1838, and since 1840 GWR
had used portable precision time pieces, chronometers, set
to Greenwich Mean Time, to help with the running of their
trains, expected periods of time for the train to travel east or
west counted with a single point of reference and therefore
the times at which the train would reach intermediate stations
and a final terminus. By 1847 most railway companies in the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – we’ll use the
terms of the time – were using GMT as the time throughout
the nation for their own purposes and on their timetables.
Yet local time still prevailed in many people’s minds over the
curious London-centric imposition of GMT, what people who
cared to be bothered by it called ‘railway time’. Similarly, the
development of telegraphy meant that, by 1852, the Post Office
could transmit the time from the Observatory at Greenwich,
and soon most if not all public clocks, or noting of the time via other public means, such as church bells, were using GMT,
though often with secondary means of noting the local and
therefore ‘real’ time. Some realised it could only be a matter of
time before the whole world would require such standardised
time. And it was a whole new world. Momentous events were
taking place in all areas of life. For example, in 1859, Darwin
finally published… Yes, OK, we all know that side of things.
(It’s possible you’re pushing it.)
In 1868, New Zealand, at the time still governed as a colony,
even though the Constitution Act of 1852 had established
a fairly independent New Zealand parliament, adopted a
standardised time of GMT+11.30. By 1880 the bulk of the
British Isles were using GMT rather than local times, spreading
out to the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, and, finally,
Ireland, which in 1880 set Dublin Mean Time, measured at
the Dunsink Observatory as GMT minus 25 minutes and 21
seconds. In 1916, GMT superseded Dublin Mean Time. The
first inklings of time zones were being established.
During these same years a number of schemes for a
worldwide system of time zones were proposed. The foremost
of these was developed by the Italian mathematician Quirico
Filopanti in the 1850s, whose system went unrecognised and
was never adopted, and then in 1876 by Kirkcaldy-born
Scots-Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming, who was instrumental
in the invention of twenty-four one-hour time zones, and
the setting of Greenwich as the prime meridian – the zero
degree by which each part of the earth relates longitudinally
by degrees. Not to say he was alone in this endeavour, and
indeed there were a number of learned committees and
political appointees who took a more or less useful part
in these developments. In one sense, Fleming might be
considered one of the great obliterators of time: he banished
all the other GMT+ and GMT-s of interim minutes – the
c h a p t e r 2
7
GMT-s of 5.45, 1.23, 9.58 and the GMT+s of 7.38, 3.46,
6.21 – leaving only 1, 2, 3, et cetera.
It was this eminent Victorian, Sir Sandford Fleming FRSC
KCMG, who, travelling in Ireland in 1876, missed a train in
Dublin one day, due to an error on the timetable between a.m.
and p .m. that obviously irritated the illustrious gentleman
greatly. The already reputed ‘most distinguished Canadian of
his age’ was then forced to spend a night at the train station.
He arrived with twenty minutes to spare for the scheduled 5:35
p .m. train. Unfortunately the train had arrived on schedule
too, at 5:35 a.m., the p .m. printed in the timetable being the
offending error. As he was left waiting for the next available
train, Fleming conceived of a simpler world with a simpler
clock, one that would consider all twenty-four hours of the day
without the fraught-with-risk possibilities of double-counting
the hours in the day. As he thought it through it became clearer
and clearer to him that it was only stupidity that kept us from
counting past the number twelve in this particular instance.
In time, he would go on to not only proposing a twenty-four
clock, but also a twenty-four hour terrestrial time that would
map over the earth in twenty-four hour intervals, beginning
with a prime meridian, proceeding by fifteen longitude degrees
around the globe, and define the hour in these geographical
locales relative to… oh, let’s say… the time at the zero hour at
Greenwich.
(Well, there you go – a ripple of applause and laughter, and
in a job-interview presentation, of all things.)
Thanks.
Order My Book of Revelations by Iain Hood directly from Renard Press here
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