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Ruth Belville: The Greenwich Time Lady. By David Rooney. London: National Maritime Museum, 2008. Pp. 192. $25.00.
Beginning in the 1830s, the Belville family offered a time service. John Henry Belville, timing assistant andmeteorologist at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, began the practice in order to transfer accurate time to subscribers in the neighborhoods of London far from the observatory itself. For that purpose, he sent out to customers once a week a silvercased pocket chronometer, certified correct to within a tenth of a second of observatory time. This timekeeper, a precision watch made in 1794, acquired the nickname "Arnold." On Belville's death, his third wife Maria continued the service by personally carrying the chronometer to subscribers. Their daughter Ruth, from whom this book takes its title, took over for her infirm mother in 1892 and continued to visit loyal customers with "Arnold" until World War II. David Rooney's slender but substantial volume tells the Belvilles' astonishing century-long story.
In the telling, Rooney addresses key questions about time.Where does clock time originate? Whose clock time is authoritatively the right...