Foundations

The foundations for this book lie in a search for time balls in Australia that might have been supplied by Maudslay, Sons & Field in London, who had made apparatus for Greenwich, Deal and Edinburgh. They built apparatus for Sydney, NSW in 1855, but no others in Australia could be attributed directly to the firm. Another was believed to have been supplied to the Cape of Good Hope in collaboration with Siemens. It was found, however, that the 1873 mechanical apparatus was instead shipped to Lyttelton, NZ. Some extraordinary errors, such as an exaggerated mass of the Edinburgh time ball, were resolved, as well as the history of a short-lived time ball in Glasgow that was replaced by controlled clocks along the Clyde. The study broadened to include visual time signals of many different types worldwide, making extensive use of lists issued by the British Admiralty from 1880 onwards. Those outside the British Empire were by then in an increasing majority.