YSM Issue 95.1

BY DHRUV PATEL
HIDDEN
HISTORIES
THE SHREWD FAMILY
BUSINESS THAT SOLD TIME
ART BY MALIA KUO
In the first four decades of the twentieth century, Ruth
Belville—alongside her modest pocket-watch—sold time as
part of her family’s business. But to truly understand her story,
we must understand why she sold time. Prior to the nineteenth
century, people kept time by referencing the position of the sun:
the sun’s peak meant it was noon, and midnight was when the
peak was furthest away. When mechanical clocks were invented,
towns and cities began keeping a local time, meaning that noon
would be exactly twenty-four hours after the previous noon.
Time zones were also adopted in the mid-nineteenth century
to standardize time across vast regions. Such standardization
allowed for synchrony across cities and states in proximity to
each other, a phenomenon that frequent travelers and railroad
companies especially appreciated. Unsurprisingly, most people
began using mechanical clocks. Though these clocks were more
reliable than others, they were still not entirely accurate. For
example, such clocks would slowly deviate from the local mean
time (determined by the time zone). It is in this context that the
story of the Belville family arises.
In London, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich was
responsible for keeping the time. To signal the time to the public,
the Observatory would raise a balloon above the building at
precisely 1 p.m. every day. Later, the Observatory installed a large
clock on its gate so that anyone could see the accurate time at any
moment rather than waiting for a signal. However, to view this
clock, people had to physically make a trip from their homes and
offices across London to the Observatory, which of course, was
inconvenient. Moreover, calibrating watches and clocks in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was more complicated
than it is today, requiring some level of expertise. Seeing this as
an opportunity to profit, John Belville, an assistant at the Royal
Observatory, began visiting a network of two hundred clients
around London once a week, calibrating their watches and
clocks with his own pocket watch, which he calibrated with the
Greenwich mean time daily. This business passed to his wife
when John died, and then to his daughter Ruth.
As with any business, the Belville family service faced
competition, particularly when Ruth took over after her
parents’ deaths. Telegraphs were capable of signaling time,
and different firms would compete to sell their telegraph
time service. Nevertheless, Ruth had an advantage: electric
telegraphs were not as accurate nor as reliable as her stateof-the-art
pocket watch, which was accurate to the tenth of a
second. Moreover, the firms selling telegraph time had trouble
keeping their services in order and received many complaints.
Ruth, however, was reliably consistent and professional.
Indeed, the watch’s accuracy and familiarity with the Belville
family business made it an easy decision for clients to remain
subscribed to this service.
Ruth Belville carried that pocket watch—which she fondly
called “Arnold”—around London every week for forty-eight
years. Each day, she would visit up to ten customers across
London, from the outskirt docklands to the central Mayfair.
Over these forty-eight years, radio became a prominent
method of communication (including communication about
time), and the electric telegraph also became more accurate
and reliable. However, there was still a market for Ruth’s
service—the new technologies did not simply replace the older
ones. Instead, they co-existed for quite some time.
Eventually, however, modern technologies outpaced Ruth’s
pocket watch. The invention of the telephone speaking clock,
which gave the precise time on the third stroke, signaled to
Ruth that her pocket watch could no longer compete with more
efficient and accessible modes of communication provided by
modern technologies. She finally retired at the age of eighty-six.
In all, the Belville family business spanned 104 years, from 1836
to 1940. Before Ruth passed in 1943, she donated Arnold to the
Clockmakers’ Company Museum.
Today, we are all accustomed to seeing the time on our phones
and digital watches. The Belville family business story is a tale
of the industrializing world, a world filled with the clashing of
the old and the new. ■
www.yalescientific.org
March 2022 Yale Scientific Magazine 39