One of the bricks turned into a cardboard box. As a result, their palace became bigger and more spectacular.īut one day, something strange happened in the palace of lies. These spirits were successful, and started getting many more bricks. So much so that the lying spirits, who were much more tricky and deceitful, sent a group of spirits to the world to get children to tell more and more lies. Both palaces were impressive - the best in the world - and each group of spirits worked hard to try to make sure that their own palace was the best. Each brick was created when a child told a lie. In just the same way was the palace of lies built. The spirits of truth would then take it and add it to the growing walls.
Every time a child told the truth, a brick was created for the palace of truth. If scientific and engineering experts could not agree, how would the public? Following some of the key players in the debate, Scott Johnston reveals how people dealt with the contradictions in global timekeeping in surprising ways - from zealots like Charles Piazzi Smyth, who campaigned for the Great Pyramid to serve as the prime meridian, to Maria Belville, who sold the time door to door in Victorian London, to Moraviantown and other Indigenous communities that used timekeeping to fight for autonomy.ĭrawing from a wide range of primary sources, The Clocks Are Telling Lies offers a thought-provoking narrative that centres people and politics, rather than technology, in the vibrant story of global time telling.Once upon a time all the spirits set about building two palaces a palace of truth, and a palace of lies. When both sides met in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, to debate the best way to organize time, disagreement abounded.
Standard time, envisioned by railway engineers such as Sandford Fleming, clashed with universal time, promoted by astronomers. The Clocks Are Telling Lies is an exploration of why we tell time the way we do, demonstrating that organizing a new global time system was no simple task. The invention of railways and telegraphs, however, created a newly interconnected world where suddenly the time differences between cities mattered. On foot or on horseback, it was impossible to travel fast enough to care that noon was a few minutes earlier or later from one town to the next.
Until the nineteenth century all time was local time.
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