u/Ok_Winter_7811

Think about it. Why did the world's most powerful families come from historic clockmaking guilds before moving into global banking? Because if you control the definition of a second, you control human energy.

​By slowly accelerating global synchronized time over the last century, they’ve forced the entire population into a state of perpetual adrenaline and panic. Shorter days mean you can't grow your own food or mend your own things—you are forced to buy fast products, fast food, and instant conveniences.

​They aren't just stealing our money through inflation. They are literally stealing our time.

Hey everyone,

​

​Bit of a niche one here, but I’ve been deep down a rabbit hole looking into the mid-19th-century standardization of British timekeeping—specifically the whole bitter feud between Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy (the Queen’s clockmaker) and Edward John Dent over who got to build the mechanism for Big Ben.

​

​I was reading through some digitized copies of Vulliamy’s private correspondence from around 1844, and he has this incredibly passionate, almost paranoid rant about Dent’s new heavy gravity-escapement designs. He keeps repeating this phrase about how a state-enforced monopoly on time calibration would "falsify the natural hour to serve the factories."

​

​I thought it was just standard Victorian professional jealousy, but out of pure curiosity, I decided to map out the gear ratios and pendulum lengths Dent used versus the older traditional standards before 1850.

​

​When I run the math on the mechanical teeth count, there is a tiny, fractional discrepancy. If you calculate the rolling gear trains, it looks like the public clocks were engineered to tick roughly 1.5% faster over a rolling 50-year period compared to actual solar time. It’s almost like they were micro-adjusting the length of a second right when the factory boom hit.

​

​I’m far from a master horologist, so I assume I’m just miscalculating the pendulum friction or missing a variable in the Victorian blueprints. Has anyone else ever dug into the actual mechanical schematics from this era? Is there a known reason why the gear trains don't perfectly align with standard astronomical time from back then?

​

​Cheers!

Hey everyone!

​

​Bit of a niche one here, but I’ve been deep down a rabbit hole looking into the mid-19th-century standardization of British timekeeping—specifically the whole bitter feud between Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy (the Queen’s clockmaker) and Edward John Dent over who got to build the mechanism for Big Ben.

​

​I was reading through some digitized copies of Vulliamy’s private correspondence from around 1844, and he has this incredibly passionate, almost paranoid rant about Dent’s new heavy gravity-escapement designs. He keeps repeating this phrase about how a state-enforced monopoly on time calibration would "falsify the natural hour to serve the factories."

​

​I thought it was just standard Victorian professional jealousy, but out of pure curiosity, I decided to map out the gear ratios and pendulum lengths Dent used versus the older traditional standards before 1850.

​

​When I run the math on the mechanical teeth count, there is a tiny, fractional discrepancy. If you calculate the rolling gear trains, it looks like the public clocks were engineered to tick roughly 1.5% faster over a rolling 50-year period compared to actual solar time. It’s almost like they were micro-adjusting the length of a second right when the factory boom hit.

​

​I’m far from a master horologist, so I assume I’m just miscalculating the pendulum friction or missing a variable in the Victorian blueprints. Has anyone else ever dug into the actual mechanical schematics from this era? Is there a known reason why the gear trains don't perfectly align with standard astronomical time from back then?

​

​Cheers!