Time's pendulum

144p

What the railroad did to bring about the rationalization of time within individual countries during the nineteenth century, wireless communication would do for the whole world in the twentieth

 

150p

More than anything else, it was the rise of the railroads that caused clock time to began to really circumscribe people's actions as well as their consciousness - not only in england, but in other countries as well. People began to want a watch not as a toy or piece of jewerly or status symbol, but in order to connect themselves with the proliferating time schdeules in the outer world.

 

160p

Pierre Curie , working in his laboratory in Paris, discovered piezoelectricity : when a pressure is applied to certain crystals (including quartz crystals), they can be made to vibrate at a very constant frequency. It was soon found that an alternating electrical current served even better than pressure to make the crystal alternately expand and contract at an extraordinarily steady rate.

 

166p

Atoms of many different elements can play the role of pendulum in atomic clocks, but the atom ultimately selected for use in defining the duration of a second was an isotope of the cesium atom, cesium-133./n