Maria Belville (1892, Daily Graphic)
For 100 years, a family literally sold the time in London.
Let’s go back in time to remember a world without smartphones and atomic watches, when there were a lot of people circulating on the streets not knowing what time it was. In this distant world there were those who literally sold the hours.
In London, Ruth Belville became known as the “Lady of Time of Greenwich”. He earned life over time as a commodity, and many depended on her to know the time. But the business, which lasted over 100 years, was family.
Your father started selling time in the nineteenth century, with a very reliable pocket watch. But let us go back even more, because this story begins in 1675.
When King Carlos II founded Greenwich’s royal observatory to improve navigation by allowing sailors to calculate longitude with greater accuracy, Greenwich became the overall reference point for time and longitude.
The Industrial Revolution brought urgency. Previously, cities regulated their clocks according to the sun, which led to discrepancies of several minutes; It was now necessary to synchronize the time for the proper functioning of railways and telegraphs, and Greenwich’s average time was legally adopted in 1880.
But there was still a problem: many had no financial abilities to have a reliable watch – it was a luxury. It was then that John Belvillewho had already worked for the observatory, saw a business opportunity ahead of him, as he recalled this week.
Once a week, he visited customers with a highly accurate pocket watch, synchronized with the observatory’s chronimeters, and for a small amount he let them adjust their own clocks with the time yours showed.
To the surprise of many, the business remained despite the appearance of public clocks and telegraph signals. Maria, her widow after her death in 1856, sold time for another 36 years. When he renovated himself, Ruth took over her parents’ business over the last century until 1940, when she was 86.
