Here you see a picture of a most unusual lady — this is one Ruth Belville, right outside the Greenwich Observatory in London in 1908. And Up until her 80s, she made her living selling time.
Belville was of a certain moment in history, right on the cusp of the so-called “Second Industrial Revolution,” which was marked by advancements in technologies such as steel production and chemistry. Ruth came from a line of timekeepers that had begun with her father, an astronomer who at the Royal Observatory who had a special pocket watch. It even had its own name: Arnold. Arnold could keep time down to the tenth of a second — an astonishing feat for the time, because it demanded a construction of spring mechanisms made of highly refined metals.
First Ruth’s father for twenty years, and then her widowed mother for thirty-six years, and finally Ruth for another forty eight years would set Arnold to the Greenwich Time and walk around the streets of London. They had hundreds of subscribers that paid the Belville clan to set their timepieces to the greatest accuracy possible.
This was an incredibly important thing in this busy period of industrialization — trains could crash into each other, liquor licences could be revoked, and people’s work schedules would be skewed without it. As Ruth Belville’s biographer David Rooney writes, for many years there was no better timekeeper than Ruth — she even continued her business past the creation of the telegraph and better timekeeping methods had come along, not retiring until 1940 when walking around the streets of London had become unsafe in World War II.
Ruth Belville put a human face on an age of automation, continuing to walk miles into her 80s. She died three years after retiring at 89, when a carbon monoxide leak asphyxiated her in her sleep. Arnold her watch was at her bedside. And now it resides at the Science Museum in London.
Source(s): Https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ruth-belville-the-greenwich-time-lady/ by David Rooney, 23 October 2015. Also in _The Alchemy of Us_.
