The first readers to follow Phileas Fogg’s breakneck journey ‘around the world in eighty days’ were startled to find 80 days for one person were not necessarily 80 days for another.  Jules Verne’s novel, first published in 1872, was a lesson in the relation between time and space.[1]  Fogg’s servant, Passpartout, carries with him a watch set on London time.  By the time the travellers reach Suez, Passpartout finds his watch reads ‘eight minutes of ten’ when the local time is noon.  When advised to reset his watch in each place he comes to, he won’t hear of it.  “It don’t vary five minutes in the year.  It is a genuine chronometer,” he boasts.  “Well, then,” he is told, “it will not agree with the sun.”  “So much the worse for the sun, monsieur!  The sun will be wrong then!”

After many adventures, including the rescue of an Indian princess at the expense of a day’s travelling time, our heroes are crossing the Pacific.  After ‘deeming incorrect the time of the various countries that he traversed’ and without resetting his watch, Passpartout makes the ‘joyful discovery’ that his venerable timekeeper agrees with the ship’s chronometers.  And so, against all odds, and at the end of 80 days’ travelling, Fogg and Passpartout arrive in London moments too late to claim the prize.  Only Fogg does claim the prize!  How can this be?  Travelling east against the sun, their days were always a little short, so when their eightieth day expired, London had only seen 79.  What a fine puzzle![2]

Today, clock time is ubiquitous.  Mantle clocks and watches are kept in check by radio time signals.  Microwave ovens and video players chart the passage of the hours.  Computers not only monitor the time but ask us to check that they have adjusted correctly for the beginning or end of daylight saving.  International travel and telecommunications have made us sensitive to time differences around the world.  Clock time pervades our lives.  This international framework of time has been achieved only gradually.

Public time was first manifest in Australia in 1797 when Governor Hunter ordered the erection of a clock tower overlooking the western side of Sydney Cove.  The subsequent multiplication of clocks only served to multiply confusion.  ‘There are but five public clocks in Sydney [observed the Sydney Morning Herald nearly fifty years later], three of which have not shown any symptoms of movement for the past five or six days.’  About the same time, Hobart had three church clocks which kept very different times.  As an observer commented: ‘There was no mean time in Hobart, the ordinary difference between the faces of the clocks varying according to whether it was a fine or wet day, and seldom exceeded more than forty, and never less than twenty minutes’.[3]  Having only one clock from which all others were set was clearly an advantage, but how could one know if the time was correct?

The clockmaker Joseph Greening maintained Melbourne’s town clock from the later months of 1846.[4]  He ‘was unable to ascertain the precise time of day, in consequence of the impossibility of taking observations without the aid of an artificial horizon, which he could not procure’.  In February 1847 he got one and ‘discovered that the town time was fast by 18 minutes 7 seconds’.  Greening put the clock back accordingly and the public were advised to regulate their clocks and watches in conformity.[5]  Such precision probably mattered little compared to the maintenance of a common standard of time within the community, at least until the coming of the railway and the telegraph.

To be able to record the time accurately was one thing, to have a clock that could maintain time accurately was another.  The erratic behaviour of the Melbourne Post Office Clock was pointed out in the press in 1853.[6]  In the middle of that year an observatory was set up at Williamstown ‘to obtain such observations as are necessary for giving time signals, rating chronometers, and generally to afford facilities to masters of vessels for testing and adjusting their nautical instruments’.[7]

The combination of an observatory and a telegraph network enabled precise and uniform time to be distributed daily.  The dropping of time balls for people to reset their clocks and watches occurred precisely at one o’clock ever day.  At first the telegraph signals were operated manually from the Observatory but from May 1862 the telegraph was connected directly to one of the Observatory clocks.  Before long the telegraph lines were used for directly controlling public clocks such as the platform clock at Spencer Street Station.  (One of the finest clocks at the Observatory, made by Frodsham in London, arrived in March 1865.  This sidereal clock, no. 1062, was transferred to Mt Stromlo Observatory when Melbourne Observatory closed in 1944.  It is now in the Melbourne Museum.)

With the spread of railways and telegraph, public time reached into the interior.  Post offices and court houses were prominent buildings in major country towns and were often graced with clock towers.  Many of these clocks in New South Wales were installed and maintained by Angelo Tornaghi.  If public time increasingly shaped people’s lives, they still had some say in how it was presented to them.  At the western end of the GPO in Sydney, public time was provided by a digital clock erected by Tornaghi in 1874.  The hour was given in large roman numerals filling the centre of the dial, the minutes around the rim indicated by a pointer.[8]  ‘This clock the public failed to appreciate [recalled the Colonial Architect, James Barnet] and it became so unpopular that it was removed’ in 1878 and replaced by the familiar three-faced clock, also made by Tornaghi.[9]

It is now possible to travel around the world in very much less than eighty days.  The relation between time and travel remains an intimate one.  It was the need for coordinated timetables for trams and trains that made the maintenance of a multitude of local times impossible.  That Warrnambool should be ten minutes later than Melbourne was of no consequence until they were linked by train and telegraph.[10]  At an intercolonial conference in 1893 it was agreed to divide Australia into three zones of standard time.  This was implemented for most of Australia in February 1895.  This meant a great deal of changing of clocks.  While ‘time’ stood still in Sydney for five minutes, in Melbourne the clocks advanced 20 minutes in an instant.  Perhaps Mr Greening need not have bothered nearly fifty years earlier!

Today, as for Passpartout, our days are regulated by the clock, not the sun.  And now it is time for me to go....

Notes

[1] Jules Verne, Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours (1872); English translation, Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).

[2] This, of course, has nothing to do with Einsteinian relativity.  By travelling east at the rate of a little more than 4.5 degrees each day, Fogg and Passpartout experienced days on average 18 minutes short of 24 hours.  Air travellers today are familiar with shortened days to a much more dramatic extent.

[3] Both quotations from Graeme Davison, The Unforgiving Minute, How Australia Learned to Tell the Time (Melbourne, 1993), p. 36

[4] In the original version of this article I had assumed the Mr Greening in charge of the clock was Benjamin.  Janine Bramley drew this error to my attention (email, 28/11/03).  Joseph Greening (b. 1791) was the youngest son of the Gloucestershire clockmaker Benjamin Greening (1756-1854).  Joseph Greening arrived in Melbourne in 1842.  Joseph’s son Benjamin was a watchmaker and mathematical instrument maker in Melbourne in the 1850s and 1860s.

[5] The Port Phillip Herald, 9 February 1847.  An artificial horizon enabled the angle between the sun or a star and its reflection to be measured with a sextant and bisected to give altitude above the horizon.

[6] See Davison, p. 37

[7] First Annual Report of the Board of Visitors to the Astronomical and magnetical Observatories’, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1860-1, vol. 3, no.18, p. 11

[8] For a photograph showing the western facade and the clock see Australia Post, The City’s Centrepiece, the history of the Sydney G.P.O. (Sydney, 1988), p. 30

[9] Memorandum, James Barnet, 16 June 1893 (typescript copy, unprovenanced photocopy in author’s possession)

[10] Table of time differences in Davison, p. 64