When writers want to make science history sound exciting, they often focus on inventions, using military vocabulary to enthuse about major breakthroughs, victories over illness or unprecedented advances along the upward path of progress. Dava Sobel's Longitude (Walker, 1995) captivated millions of readers who enjoyed believing that a single inspired innovation - John Harrison's clock - had solved the greatest scientific problem of the age. Other historians are more circumspect. In the opinion of David Rooney, author of Ruth Belville: The Greenwich Time Lady and curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, "New technologies don't simply replace old ones... they just add another layer of complexity to our lives." Decades after electrical time signals were introduced, he explains, many public clocks still operated mechanically, telling different times and so generating confusion rather than imparting information. How could passers-by know which of them, if any, was right?
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