In 1707, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell's fleet sailed blind through fog for twelve days. Every navigator was certain they were safely in open water. Every single one was wrong. Four warships struck the rocks of Scilly in under four minutes. Two thousand men drowned within sight of English shores—all because no one on Earth could reliably determine longitude.
The problem was time. Know the time in London while standing in the middle of the ocean, and you know exactly where you are. Lose track of time, and you are lost.
This is the story of how we solved that problem—and in doing so, remade human civilization.
From a self-taught carpenter in Lincolnshire who spent forty years building the impossible, to a King who thundered "By God, Harrison, I will see you righted!" From railways that devoured local noon and replaced it with standardized schedules, to the Day of Two Noons when America reset every clock simultaneously. From an anarchist who tried to bomb time itself out of existence, to cesium atoms vibrating nine billion times per second in satellites orbiting twenty thousand kilometers above your head.
This episode spans three centuries of genius, obsession, institutional cruelty, and technological triumph. You'll meet John Harrison, whose pocket watch H4 solved the longitude problem with an accuracy thirty times better than required—and who was denied his prize by rivals who couldn't accept that a provincial tradesman had outperformed the entire scientific establishment. You'll witness the chaos of 300 different local times across America, trains crashing because conductors couldn't agree when noon occurred. You'll understand why the French refused to acknowledge Greenwich time for twenty-seven years after the rest of the world adopted it.
And you'll discover the moment in 1967 when time was severed from the cosmos forever—when we stopped defining seconds by the Earth's rotation and started defining them by atomic vibration. The clock was right. The planet was wrong.
We have captured eternity in a box, wound it with a key, and hung it on the wall. The revolution is complete. The mystery endures.