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Time Tamed
'Downright fascinating...indispensable reading' Daily Telegraph
'Nicholas Foulkes' excellent...book is beautifully illustrated. Captivating' Daily Mail
For more than 25,000 years, humanity has sought to understand and measure the passing of time, in the process creating some of the most remarkable and beautiful timepieces. Now, in Nicholas Foulkes' lavishly illustrated book, the battle to tame time is brought vividly to life.
From the baboon bone dating back to the palaeolithic era that marked the lunar cycle and on to the 3500-year-old water clock at Karnak, from our earliest days mankind has sought to track the passing of time. More recently, the struggles to measure longitude and to create a workable train timetable across the vast, open expanse of the United States have inspired new developments. In Time Tamed , Nicholas Foulkes reveals how we have done this by focusing on some of the most significant developments in timekeeping across the ages. He also highlights the most stunning and lavish clocks and watches in history - from Big Ben to Rolex - for telling the time has never been purely about function, but also about design.
The book is filled with remarkable tales, from the 14th century monk in St Albans who created one of the first mechanical clocks to the Holy Roman Emperor who built a clock into an automated ship that fired a cannon to summon guests to dinner. More recently, there was the Surrey woman who used a Napoleonic era watch to 'deliver' the accurate time to London shopkeepers in the wartime era of Churchill , or the Swiss denture maker who solved a tricky problem for the Indian Raj's polo players. Time Tamed is a book you'll want to spend many hours enjoying.
'Nicholas Foulkes' excellent...book is beautifully illustrated. Captivating' Daily Mail
For more than 25,000 years, humanity has sought to understand and measure the passing of time, in the process creating some of the most remarkable and beautiful timepieces. Now, in Nicholas Foulkes' lavishly illustrated book, the battle to tame time is brought vividly to life.
From the baboon bone dating back to the palaeolithic era that marked the lunar cycle and on to the 3500-year-old water clock at Karnak, from our earliest days mankind has sought to track the passing of time. More recently, the struggles to measure longitude and to create a workable train timetable across the vast, open expanse of the United States have inspired new developments. In Time Tamed , Nicholas Foulkes reveals how we have done this by focusing on some of the most significant developments in timekeeping across the ages. He also highlights the most stunning and lavish clocks and watches in history - from Big Ben to Rolex - for telling the time has never been purely about function, but also about design.
The book is filled with remarkable tales, from the 14th century monk in St Albans who created one of the first mechanical clocks to the Holy Roman Emperor who built a clock into an automated ship that fired a cannon to summon guests to dinner. More recently, there was the Surrey woman who used a Napoleonic era watch to 'deliver' the accurate time to London shopkeepers in the wartime era of Churchill , or the Swiss denture maker who solved a tricky problem for the Indian Raj's polo players. Time Tamed is a book you'll want to spend many hours enjoying.
429 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 31, 2019
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66 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 23, 2020
“The pursuit of time - and efforts to capture it with machines - has involved strong personalities and great characters who, through their stubborn perseverance, innate genius or sheer eccentricity, have written their names into the history of timekeeping."
This is a humorously narrativised compilation of timepieces that have developed our understanding of time. Its anecdotal approach mirrors Garfield's in his book 'Timekeepers' and reveals the tricky truth Foulkes calls 'the pursuit of time': time isn't something that can ever be accurately summarised in one neat package. Its passing can only be measured with watches and clocks (or baboon fibulas!) which can be extravagant but inaccurate works of art, mechanisms that show metric and sidereal time at one latitude, or simple gadgets designed to withstand the conditions of the moon.
I read this for a creative project I'm working on and found it incredibly illuminating, especially the first third of the book, which proves that the invention of timekeeping was precisely what allowed human beings to develop into the dominant species we are today: "The link made between the passage of time and the recurrence of seasonal events would have had obvious importance for hunter-gatherers, who would be very interested in forecasting the migratory patterns of their quarry. And, of course, thousands of years later, the move from hunting and gathering to an agricultural system would have been impossible without an appreciation of time: without it, how would one know the most propitious times to sow and harvest, or be able to calculate the quantity of food necessary to sustain the community in the interval between planting seeds and reaping the crop?”
This is where the book really shone for me, as it explained the baffling mathematical task of organising time in a way that matched the solar cycle in a regular (what we would now refer to as 'yearly') way, which is complicated by the presence of the lunar cycle, and how to reconcile the two: “The Earth’s rotation on its axis provided the span of the day, and the period of the Earth’s elliptical 365.25-day (give or take) orbit of the sun provided what we call a year. Meanwhile, the moon supplied the observable phenomenon of its waxing and waning, a cycle that took approximately 29.5 days, on which we have based the concept of a month. The problem of course, was that the solar and lunar cycles do not quite co-ordinate.”
The ways different civilisations tried to accurately measure time were fascinating to learn about, in particular Ancient Egypt's Karnak Clepsydra, which literally translates as 'water thief'. A bowl that becomes narrower at the base to regulate water pressure, the water recedes at a steady rate. The interior of the bowl includes markings that tell you the time in reference to the water level. It's incredibly clever stuff!
For such a complicated subject, Foulkes' writing is lyrical with pun-aplenty, which I loved. My favourite timepieces were those that play about with how we structure time, such as Benjamin Franklin's Obelisk Clock and Japan's Wadokei. For something we take for granted as a basic, undisputed fact of life, time and humanity's quest to measure it is a delightfully action-packed one, arguably always in the process of being written (who knows whether a new innovation in timekeeping will revolutionise the way we experience time?) Combining science, anthropology and history, this is a fabulously told treatise on the history of timekeeping that anyone with an interest should read.
This is a humorously narrativised compilation of timepieces that have developed our understanding of time. Its anecdotal approach mirrors Garfield's in his book 'Timekeepers' and reveals the tricky truth Foulkes calls 'the pursuit of time': time isn't something that can ever be accurately summarised in one neat package. Its passing can only be measured with watches and clocks (or baboon fibulas!) which can be extravagant but inaccurate works of art, mechanisms that show metric and sidereal time at one latitude, or simple gadgets designed to withstand the conditions of the moon.
I read this for a creative project I'm working on and found it incredibly illuminating, especially the first third of the book, which proves that the invention of timekeeping was precisely what allowed human beings to develop into the dominant species we are today: "The link made between the passage of time and the recurrence of seasonal events would have had obvious importance for hunter-gatherers, who would be very interested in forecasting the migratory patterns of their quarry. And, of course, thousands of years later, the move from hunting and gathering to an agricultural system would have been impossible without an appreciation of time: without it, how would one know the most propitious times to sow and harvest, or be able to calculate the quantity of food necessary to sustain the community in the interval between planting seeds and reaping the crop?”
This is where the book really shone for me, as it explained the baffling mathematical task of organising time in a way that matched the solar cycle in a regular (what we would now refer to as 'yearly') way, which is complicated by the presence of the lunar cycle, and how to reconcile the two: “The Earth’s rotation on its axis provided the span of the day, and the period of the Earth’s elliptical 365.25-day (give or take) orbit of the sun provided what we call a year. Meanwhile, the moon supplied the observable phenomenon of its waxing and waning, a cycle that took approximately 29.5 days, on which we have based the concept of a month. The problem of course, was that the solar and lunar cycles do not quite co-ordinate.”
The ways different civilisations tried to accurately measure time were fascinating to learn about, in particular Ancient Egypt's Karnak Clepsydra, which literally translates as 'water thief'. A bowl that becomes narrower at the base to regulate water pressure, the water recedes at a steady rate. The interior of the bowl includes markings that tell you the time in reference to the water level. It's incredibly clever stuff!
For such a complicated subject, Foulkes' writing is lyrical with pun-aplenty, which I loved. My favourite timepieces were those that play about with how we structure time, such as Benjamin Franklin's Obelisk Clock and Japan's Wadokei. For something we take for granted as a basic, undisputed fact of life, time and humanity's quest to measure it is a delightfully action-packed one, arguably always in the process of being written (who knows whether a new innovation in timekeeping will revolutionise the way we experience time?) Combining science, anthropology and history, this is a fabulously told treatise on the history of timekeeping that anyone with an interest should read.
December 7, 2020
A really, really great book for all interested in time and horology. This is my first book by Mr. Nicholas Foulkes and I hope not my last (I want my hands on that Patek biography). Can't really tell much. If you are interested on how people told time in various periods in history and if you want to know more about historically significant watches then this a must-read book. This book was something like a great whisky, you don't just read (drink) it, you savour every page.
August 17, 2024
A captivating collection of descriptions of the most interesting clocks and watches through the ages.
To my surprise, I could not find a single mention of quartz watches... that's why 4 stars and not 5.
To my surprise, I could not find a single mention of quartz watches... that's why 4 stars and not 5.
December 9, 2019
Enjoyed it, but I can't have loved it because I let my borrowing date expire before I finished it.
July 31, 2025
Amazing book
Amazing book about history of measuring time and most influential time pieces in history. Must read for any watch afficionado or anyone interested in time.
Amazing book about history of measuring time and most influential time pieces in history. Must read for any watch afficionado or anyone interested in time.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews