Profession of selling time

At the end of the 19th century in London there was an extremely necessary service that few people believed today had: Ruth Belville would knock on doors every day to announce the exact time, in exchange for a good remuneration. That 'exact time trade' profession is appreciated by many people, and soon there is a rare competition.

Strange job

Arnold is not a tangerine watch like any other watch. Not really because it had an expensive silver shell, nor because the intestine contained a mechanical machine that was classified as the most accurate in the UK. The first owner of the watch was the Southern District of Sussex, the county of Sussex. Disappointed by the rough appearance, August Friedrich's public office threw it back to the manufacturing workshop, accompanied by a "watch that is as big as a potty" libel . But it was not so that Arnold was known by the London capital.

That merit belonged to a woman who lovingly named Arnold for an oversized mandarin watch with 485/786 number, with sincere respect, because Arnold generated income for her family. , through a unique profession throughout the UK: a part-time trade.

From 1892 onwards, Mrs. Belville could be seen every day walking along the streets of London, starting from the observation deck in Greenwich, where she calibrated the watch accurately. She then went into the inner city and the West End, occasionally knocking on the door and receiving a small amount of money to allow the landlord to see Arnold, then move on.

This rare form of business is the inheritance gift of her parents, who have been working as a job announcing the time since 1836. The power to pick up is tight, Mrs. Belville has 200 customers in the city and lives quite well with This bizarre work, she even has a name called 'Greenwich Time Lady' - is a great honor, since Greenwich or London is still the capital of the hour exactly as every student learned in the first physics lesson.

Punctual like a train

Artwork: Internet

Today it may be difficult to imagine, but the early 19th century did not have much ability to correct the wristwatch correctly, unless it ran to the nearest square or church to see the public clock, but they ran Too bad. The only standard in the UK is in the royal astronomers' office, the Royal Greenwich Observatory.

Because many people are knocking on the door of an observation station every day to ask for time, astronomers are always harassed. In 1836 they were forced to create an hourly service run by an assistant. Assistant John Henry Belville was given a sophisticated watch from the 'John Arnold & Son' watch factory and had to go to the city every day. John Henry Belville is Ruth Belville's father.

It turned out to be a lucrative job. Because at the same time a growing industry, occupying an important position in economic life, is constantly making consumers angry: the railway industry. Until then, the measurement of time in England was extremely rudimentary. Each locality has its own time, and it is quite different from the neighborhood local time, even in the UK, it has deviated up to 20 minutes! As long as transportation is primarily horse-drawn, no one is bothered, but things get worse with the spread of the railway network.

By 1821, the UK had 120 railroad companies with thousands of kilometers of railroads. The inaccuracy of the hours caused chaos at transfer stations, not to mention the accident that happened like meals, just because each station has its own clock. In 1840, the Great Western Railway initiated a standard hour of 'Railway Time' for all of its stations - a project to standardize the world's first time, and follow a model watch at the Royal Greenwich Observatory.

Other railway companies followed suit, gradually the bank system also put the Greenwich timer system into use. For watchmakers, adjusting the Greenwich timer is the default quality measure. The people who do not adjust to Greenwich time are invisible when they are disrespectful! John Henry Belville's work flourished, until his death in 1856.

Fierce competition

Maria Belville widow worked on her husband's work until 1892, after which her legs were tired and passed on to her daughter. Ruth Belville or Greenwich Time Lady became famous, perhaps too famous and now the refugees appeared.

On March 4, 1908, a man named St. John Wynne gave a fiery speech before the London council, calling for a unification - he demanded that all watches in Britain be adjusted to Greenwich, based on telegraph technology. Not stopping there, the speaker ignorantly ignored Ruth Belville's words, saying that she received a special license to do this in a way that "no man can do it".

Three days later, the London edition of the Times newspaper republished Wynne's speech, including a vulgar hint of Ruth Belville using 'equity' . The Times just doesn't give a single detail: Wynne is the owner of Standard Time Company, Britain's largest private company that supplies telegraph signals.

Reporters sneaked around Ruth Bellville everywhere she went to interview. And Wynne's dangerous attack suddenly caused him to beat his back: after this, Ruth Belville became even more famous. She recorded: "Maybe the Standard Time Company will not dare to attack me again." And she guessed right: even when telegraphy developed, her service was still popular, single. It is easy and cheap because it is no longer a signal like a telegraph.

After all, only a new technology came out that left Ruth Belville for Arnold to retire, ending a century of bringing home accurate time to London: On July 24, 1936, a new telecommunications service was born, A female voice records the Greenwich time message exactly every second. People just press the buttons 8, 4, 6 (corresponding to the letters T, I and M). In folklore, people call that voice 'Tim'. Even in the first year, Londoners alone called for 20 million times. A few years later Ruth Belville also washed her guard, when there were only 50 customers left.