About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Author:David Rooney [Rooney, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, civilization, World, science, Time, Technology & Engineering, Measurement
ISBN: 9780393867947
Google: rgIDEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-08-17T00:21:01.486523+00:00

IT WAS JUST after eight o’clock one morning in 1928 when Henry Ford knocked at the front door of London’s Science Museum, asking to be let in. The attendant on duty told him the museum did not open until midmorning, but when Ford informed him who he was, it did not take long for an urgent message to reach the museum’s keeper of engineering, Henry Dickinson, who promptly raced down, accompanied by other senior colleagues, to meet the famous American carmaker and industrialist.

Henry Dickinson might have been me, but for the passage of a few decades. During the fifteen years when I was a curator—latterly a keeper—in the Science Museum’s engineering collections, many was the time I would take a call from my colleagues on the front desk asking me to come and meet visitors who had arrived with questions about the artifacts in my care. It was never a chore. I have always loved discussing the history of technology with people who share my interests. It is all too easy for back-office staff in big museums to become disconnected from the people who really matter—the public. Occasionally the timing could be inconvenient if I was in the middle of something or heading for one of the meetings that seem to be a constant feature of museum life. But I always came away with new knowledge and insights from these impromptu conversations.

I like to think that Henry Dickinson felt the same sense of anticipation as he walked a path I came to know so well, striding through the museum’s majestic East Hall, filled with steam engines from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by engineers such as Thomas Newcomen, Richard Trevithick and James Watt, before bounding up the stairs into the museum’s entrance hall to meet his visitor. Having ushered Ford through the doors that morning in 1928, Dickinson proceeded to tour the carmaker around the museum’s rich array of exhibits, doubtless asking more questions than he answered. Later, Ford was shown the museum’s engineering section, which includes such icons as Puffing Billy, the world’s oldest surviving locomotive, and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, which ran between Liverpool and Manchester on the world’s first modern railway. Ford was overwhelmed by what he saw, and I am not surprised. I was, too, every time I had the pleasure of showing the museum’s visitors the very same exhibits.

The purpose of Ford’s visit in 1928 was to scout for engineering relics for a museum he was building at the Michigan town of Dearborn, and his ambitions were as expansive as his spending. Several times during his visit, Ford offered to buy the historic exhibits, including Rocket, only to be politely rebuffed by Science Museum staff.

But Ford was also building a historic village alongside his museum, with reconstructions of legendary American buildings such as Orville and Wilbur Wright’s cycle shop, Henry J. Heinz’s family home and the courthouse in which Abraham Lincoln practiced as a lawyer. It opened to the public in 1933 and remains one of America’s most popular attractions.

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