Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.

In our history of the world told through things, we've now entered the long

19th century, the years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, years in which

Western Europe and America were transformed from agricultural societies into

industrial powerhouses. This week's programs track some of the extraordinary

changes that resulted. New technologies led for the first time to mass production of luxury

goods. Societies reorganise themselves politically at home,

while overseas empires expanded to secure raw materials and new markets.

This programme is about time,

and our object is a clock a marine chronometer made around 1800

But the point of this clock wasn't so much to tell you the time as to tell you where you were

The pips that announce the passing of the hours on Radio 4

are the familiar sound of Greenwich meantime,

and the story of our chronometer is intimately connected to Greenwich.

It explains why in one crucial sense the world divides here and why every part of the world measures its time and defines its

position in relation to this Southeast London suburb. In a lot of accounts

what you find is people saying that actually the Industrial Revolution fuels exact timekeeping

but I'd argue it's exact timekeeping that in part fuels the industrial revolution.

So this object is really, I say, considerably more important

than the landing on the moon, I'd say.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. Ships Granometer from HMS Beagle,

Made in England in the early 19th century. In 1831 this chronometer accompanied Darwin on his great voyage to South America and the Galapagos Islands that's ultimately led to his theories of evolution and the great work on the origin of species.

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