Ship's chronometer from HMS Beagle
A History of the World in 100 Objects
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The Evolution of Time
By the early twentieth century, every country fixed its time zone by reference to Greenwich Mean Time. But our chronometer was witnessed to another quite separate shift in the nineteenth century's understanding of time. Darwin's voyage on the Beagle and his subsequent work on evolution pushed human origins into an unthinkably distant past. And geologists had already demonstrated that the earth was far older than previously believed. These new and constantly expanding parameters of time forced the nineteenth century to rethink from scratch the nature and meaning of human existence.
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