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Celebrating 250 Years of Accurate Timekeeping

Our installation is centred around a monumental kinetic sculpture entitled Heartbeat of the City. Its unique design was inspired by one of the most important timepieces in history—Thomas Mudge’s “Queen Charlotte watch.” Constructed in 1770—exactly 250 years ago—Mudge’s creation incorporated one of mankind’s most important and enduring engineering achievements: the lever escapement. This magical device is found in almost every mechanical wristwatch ever manufactured. 

An escapement is a mechanical linkage that alternately arrests and releases the gear train of a watch at a rate determined by a mechanism called the “balance”—the beating heart of the watch. The balance is a mechanical structure—traditionally a spoked wheel or “balance wheel” anchored to the main body of the movement by a flat spiral spring. The spring, often called a “hairspring,” must be very carefully designed to coordinate with the balance wheel.

When the watchmaker gets it right, the balance wheel and hairspring work together to form a mechanically resonant system: if a short sharp knock is delivered to the balance wheel, it rotates back and forth at a prescribed rate—or beat—determined solely by the stiffness of the spring and the inertia of the balance wheel. This system, when finely tuned and working properly, keeps a watch beating steadily, an engineering marvel that permits accurate timekeeping despite the bumps and jolts to which wrist and pocket watches—personal timekeepers—have always been subject.

In the early history of watchmaking generations of talented scientists and engineers grappled with the challenge of developing a reliable escapement. Many clever designs were produced, but none that offered the combination of accuracy and precision that watch owners take for granted today. The invention of the lever escapement at the end of the 18th Century ushered in a new era in horology. Every mechanical watch designed and built since can trace its roots to this revolution in robust, reliable, temperature-tolerant timekeeping.

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In order to understand the enormity of the transformation brought about by the lever escapement, it is necessary to take a step back and consider how human society understands and assimilates the physical world more broadly — takes measure of its environment. The ability to measure things relative to one another is a skill practiced and valued across the width and breadth of the animal kingdom. For prey animals, keeping away from things with jaws large enough to make a snack of them is a key survival skill. Similarly, for predators, continued existence depends on choosing meaty but manageable meals.

However, over time, the human desire to measure things has moved far beyond such basic concerns and has evolved into something that, though no less important, is greatly more sophisticated. Systems of measurement exist in every civilisation. Measurement underpins the ability to organise communities, distribute land, trade in goods, build things efficiently, express ourselves creatively, and, in general, organize and comprehend the complexities of, well, a complex world. Improvements in measurement techniques have always driven the advancement of knowledge and technology. New discoveries in engineering, medicine and the physical sciences have always depended on careful measurement. Measurement is essential to the scientific method. And in the hierarchy of variables that might be measured, none is more important than time. Time is the very stuff in which all other measurements are made.

Next year, the international space station will receive an instrument that contains a clock accurate to one second in 300 million years. To put this in perspective, if the reptiles had strapped watches like these to their scaly wrists when they first evolved from the swamps they might just be a second out by now. This is timekeeping accuracy that challenges even our very command of the concept of time; extending as it does more in the direction of eternity than gradations we can readily contemplate or, in our common experience, relate. 

Before the end of the 18th century, time was a relative thing—a creature largely of lived experience. The “time” to do things was more often a question of necessity or convenience than any measure of timeliness imposed by an external source of standard time. Personal timekeepers were rare and, if a village had a blacksmith-made tower clock—it kept time only vaguely. Every village kept its different time, typically keyed to the changing hours of light and darkness throughout the year. Time was measured in terms of life events and daily rituals. It was very much the product of human action—responsive to the rhythm of existence, both personal and communal.

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The invention of the lever escapement made it possible for everyone to have access to their own reliable timekeeper—paving the way for the standardisation of time and, with it, the timetable. Time is now an “official” number: it comes up the same for everyone. Though time’s ultimate source may be vague, its authority is widely accepted. Disregard its mandate and one risks being “late.” Too eager and you’re “early.” This perceived omnipotence of time, and the broad human subservience it commands, owes much to Mudge and the early pioneers of lever escapement watches.

Today’s best timekeepers declare near perfection—that one second in 300 million years seemingly the only space between them and divinity. The age when human beings and their homely routines defined time is as much a forgotten historical curiosity as the Queen Charlotte for whom that first reliable watch was named.

Using a system of sensors, once fully operational, the mechanism within this new sculpture will derive its tempo from the vibrations of the city in which it stands and the footsteps—even the words—of the visitors who come to see it. In this way, Heartbeat of the City will embody the forgotten but inextricable link between the concept of time and those who seek to measure it. It is meant to remind us that the idea of time would be empty without reference to the people whose lives, loves, struggles and accomplishments fill time with meaning. History gives time shape, texture and size. Even as time symbolizes our own mortality, therefore, it is human beings that give life to time.

Heartbeat of the City encourages you to contemplate not only your own relationship to time, but also the profound social influence of the science it embodies.