Volume 30, Number 19 · December 8, 1983
On the Watch
By E.J. Hobsbawm
Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World
by David S. Landes
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 482 pp., $20.00
Probably only two mechanical inventions have been fully assimilated by creative literature. One is the railroad train, familiar as image and metaphor to every lover of the blues. The other, one learns from David Landes, is the clock, which first enters poetry in the days of the Roman de la rose and Dante. It takes a civilized historian (not a universal species among specialists in economic and technological history) to know, let alone to translate, medieval French verse, but it takes a first-rate historian to integrate poetry into his argument, and to use Sir John Suckling and Alexander Pope in tracing the growth of standardized time-measurement in the course of the seventeenth century. David Landes is both.
Review, 2248 words
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