Caesium the Day! Getting a Hold of Time
New Year's resolutions and a historical look at time-keeping | Author Alison Lloyd's newsletter #49
Happy 2025!
I came home from holidays to an inbox of emails promising to help me manage my time effectively, and achieve new writing goals in 2025. New Year being the season for resolutions etc...
I’m not offering you that kind of advice — I am moderately efficient at best 😝 But inspired by the New Year, this email brings you:
a historical angle on time management
including the story of the world’s most expensive pocket watch
an email series of surprising historical life advice
and a very short, time-efficient piece of fiction
Caesium the Day!
Speaking of time, did you know the scientific definition of a second changed last century? A second was once 1/86,400 of the mean solar day (24 hours x 1/24 x1/60 x1/60 = 1 second). That method is too loose for modern science — it turns out that the Earth’s rotation is slowing, so a second would get longer over time.
In 1967 the second was officially redefined:
1 second = 9,192,631,770 movements of a caesium 133 atom.
(A more technical explanation can be found here for the scientifically minded.)
When I found that out, I couldn’t resist the (terrible?) pun of this email’s title.
Keeping the Time
Measuring time has long been important to humans, as ancient calendars, sun dials and water clocks show. But it wasn’t until sixteenth century Europe that people began actually keeping the time on them in person. Queen Elizabeth I was the owner of the first recorded watch:
a richly jewelled armlet, having in the closing thereof a clock, and in the forepart of the same a fair lozenge diamond without a foil, hanging thereat a round jewel fully garnished with diamonds and a pearl pendant.1
Sounds very blingy! Unfortunately I have no picture for you, as this ‘clocke’ has been lost to time.
Very, very Valuable Time
But I do have a photo of what was the world’s most expensive watch for 200 years. It was eclipsed in value only in this century. Valuations are pretty arbitrary, but various internet punters think it’s worth around US$30 million.
Why so much? Partly it’s the history of the piece. This pocket-watch was commissioned for the ill-fated French queen Marie Antoinette, who rather liked clocks. (As well as cake, and costumes, and other expensive habits.)
The watch’s materials are sumptuous — it’s made of gold, platinum, rubies and sapphires. More than a time piece, it’s a mechanical marvel. It also shows celestial time, a perpetual calendar, a chronograph (like a stopwatch) and a thermometer. And it chimes. Appropriately, it’s called ‘The Grand Complication’.
And the watch has seen complications. The watchmaker, Breguet, fled France during the Revolution, so work on the piece stopped for several years, and Marie Antoinette never got to see it. The watch was finished in 1802.
In 1983 it went on display at a museum in Jerusalem. And was stolen, along with 105 other clocks and watches. The theft was unsolved…Until decades later, when the thief’s widow tried to sell the goods, and prospective buyers tipped off the police.
Watchmaker Breguet went on to make watches for other famous women, including Napoleon’s sister, Caroline Murat. She kicked off a nineteenth century fashion for women’s bracelet watches. Caroline Murat’s first watchband was made of human hair, entwined with gold.
Timely Thoughts
When Marie Antoinette was imprisoned in 1792 she asked to have a pocket watch. (Not the Grand Complication.) It makes you wonder whether it might not have been depressing, watching the seconds tick away in her dire circumstances. But perhaps it feels even worse to not know even the time, and the watch brought some order and comfort to her day.
For everything there is a season, and a time for every activity under heaven.
Book of Ecclesiastes
I love hanging up an arty new calendar in January, and customising a new diary. It’s part of that heady New Year restart — all the things I could do!
But the New Year also gives me a giddy feeling of time rushing along like a ride that’s a bit fast for comfort. ‘Where did last year go?’ The idea of controlling time has limitations. We can stick our oar in and try to steer, but the general flow won’t stop. Even if we’d like some things to last forever.
God has set eternity in the hearts of man.
Ecclesiastes 3:11
Those last two quotes are from one of the most surprising books of the Bible. It offers ancient life advice, with a sometimes modern feel. If you’d like to think about time, work, goals, and the meaning of life, from the perspective of a royal writer, I’ve put together a 14-day series of emails exploring the Book of Ecclesiastes. No cheery memes inside, but some of the best writing of the ancient world IMHO.
Or if you’d rather read the whole in one go:
Short story
Lastly for this month, here’s a story I wrote last year. It had to be exactly 100 words, prompted by the picture below. It isn’t about time exactly, but it’s kind of in the same vibe, since it’s about stars and the universe.2
Beyond the Frame
The artist saw his little girl balanced against a backdrop of darkling sky, on the open window’s sill – at the edge of in and out, up and down. A long way down.
He breathed the cold air flowing in. He mustn’t startle her.
‘What are you doing?’
She faced the stars. ‘Catching the fairy dust in my cup.’
The stars blinked.
‘Ah.’ He shivered.
He coaxed her back. Tomorrow, he’d draw her, with the window framing deep night.
Even the universe has an edge, he thought. Who is looking through its frame? Can I catch that mystery in my cup?
How are you feeling about the new year? I hope it’s off to a great start for you. My plans include more fiction and history with heart for you, still on a monthly basis, and still free. Plus, I hope to have publication news on my nineteenth century novel — whether a publisher or self-published is TBC. And I’m starting to plan a new novel…
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Fascinating newsletter! I really struggled with overwhelm in 2024, so my plans for 2025 are still a bit tentative — I have a big house project I really want to start, but at the same time I've rather nervous about getting overwhelmed by it all again. Given that one huge issue/project finally just completed, I probably need some time off...but I would so love to get writing again. At the moment I'm just trying to catch up, and at the same time not fall behind with the garden and other things that feed me.