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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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WOULDN’T YOU JUST LIKE TO BUY SOME TIME, NOW AND THEN…....?

Well, for over 50 years around London, you’d have bought it from Ruth Belville. It all sounds very quaint and Victorian, but there was a snake in the grass…...

If you wanted to know the time in 1930s London, you could listen for the pips on the radio, subscribe to a telegraphic time service - or arrange a weekly visit from an octogenarian spinster called Ruth Belville. For almost 50 years, Miss Belville had carried Greenwich Mean Time from its home at the Royal Observatory to a few dozen clients around the city, using a watch even older than she was. Members of the Belville family had been running this service with the same silver-cased chronometer for more than a century, and despite the arrival of new technologies, their business flourished. But as newly discovered documents show, at the start of the 20th century one of the most powerful people in the time industry did his best to put Ruth out of business…

I’ll bet that this is something that you, like yours truly, had never heard of! READ THE WHOLE THING.......only you can’t, unless you’re a subscriber…..so maybe you’ll have to get the February 25 issue of New Scientist! Sorry.

Here’s the last couple of paragraphs:

Rooney believes that even in its later years, Ruth’s business was not the anachronism most people thought. The telegraph had its own drawbacks. You had to rent your own telegraph line, which was expensive, and when wires and relays failed - as they often did - the service came to a halt. Ruth, on the other hand, only missed a day if ill. After 1924 the time pips were broadcast by radio, but early wireless sets were costly and required a licence and a large aerial.

Eventually radios did become commonplace, and from 1936 anyone with access to a telephone could get their GMT by calling the speaking clock. Yet when Ruth finally gave up her rounds, probably in 1939 at the age of 86, she still had some 50 subscribers. She died four years later leaving no heir, and so remains London’s last time carrier.
From issue 2540 of New Scientist magazine, 25 February 2006, page 52

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/14 at 03:54 PM

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