INVICTA JUST FOR HER IN THE MEAN TIME… In a showcase at the Clockmakers Museum in London, sits a pocketchronometer made by John Arnold for the Duke of Sussex. Modest and unassuming, it’s hard to believe that at one time, the watch had such an important job. Affectionately known by its maker's name “Arnold”, it was this chronometer that kept London running on time for nearly 90 years. As the marking of time took on greater importance with the emergence of the Industrial Age, the need for coordinated accuracy became necessary. Having established Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the Old Royal Observatory in London became the official source for that accuracy. Instead of watchmakers going to the observatory as they once did, in 1840, astronomer, John Henry Belville, was tasked with taking the accurate time to the watchmakers. Belville went on to create a formal business that charged a small fee for this timekeeping service. Even when time began to be distributed from Greenwich via electric signals in 1852, the service remained very much in demand. Upon Belville’s death a few years later, at the request of his subscribers, his wife Maria picked up Arnold and the time, taking to the London streets to offer the service for a further thirty-six years. But it was Belville’s daughter, Ruth, who is best known for the timekeeping service and is known in history as the “Greenwich Time Lady.” Even though the telegraph technology was firmly in place when Ruth took over in 1892, it was not as accurate as the eighteenth-century pocketchronograph.
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