Good two-part mini-series that's based on the book (Jeremy Irons, Michael Gambon):
Sobel did a great job in editing down the history to an engrossing tale, even if you're not the type of person who would normally be interested in marine chronography.
Made me appreciate the differences between the before-clock and after-clock worlds.
Before standardized time, it was very difficult to coordinate. Most US towns would have their own local time (think church steeples ringing out the hours), and there were 80+ different time standards across the country. In Massachusetts, for example, there were differences between Boston time and Worcester time, two cities that are ~45 miles apart.
Trains had trouble coordinating: if you're using the same sets of tracks, it's essential that you have a very good idea of where trains are going to be. Unfortunately, there were many collisions between trains as a result of mismatched times between the conductors and stations. [1]
In 1849, William Bond (owner of William Bond & Sons’ Boston) partnered with Harvard to offer the first standardized time from Harvard College Observatory. Time standardization between railroads, which started as a voluntary agreement, became mandatory after the Valley Falls collision. [2] As use of the telegraph spread, time standardization began to spread as well.
The idea of a train conductor holding a pocket watch has become quaint now, but it used to be the difference between life and death for passengers. Part of the cause of the Valley Falls collision (and several others) was a train conductor with a faulty pocket watch.
Another interesting rabbit hole to go down is the standardization of the prime meridian, why Greenwich was chosen [3] (hence Greenwich Mean Time [4]), and why the French were so upset about this (part of the reason time today is called UTC). Part of the reason GMT is the standard has to do with what Sobel discusses at the end of the book [5]: Nevil Maskelyne, the primary antagonist, published The Nautical Almanac, which was for many years the primary reference of sailors across the globe when determining time. All measurements for that book were taken from Greenwich; hence, when governments went to standardize a prime meridian, Greenwich was the obvious choice.
Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments has a fun collection of clocks that illustrate the challenges related to this. [6] It's a small but underrated museum when looking at places to go in Cambridge.
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/11/americas-firs...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Falls_train_collision
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_meridian#Prime_meridian_...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Mean_Time
[5] I don't remember if Sobel discussed this or not in the book
Also, if you can find the book by Williams called "From Sails to Satellites: The Origin and Development of Navigational Science" you'll laugh out loud at his wit about navigation throughout the book.
I'm starting to see Henry Maudslay's screw cutting lathe (1800) as a turning point. Before it, inventors could invent really cool devices, and carefully hand make one or a few, but they would be too expensive. Then machine tools made shaping metal cheaper. That included shaping metal to make machine tools. So costs fell and fell, and eventually all sorts of things became cheap enough for wide deployment.
That is scary, because the "right time" to invent something depends on the capabilities of production machinery setting the production cost. As an inventor, one likes to think of success of the inventing lying in ones own hands, but there is an ecosystem of production machinery that has an out sized say in how much your invention will cost to mass produce. It can even veto an excellent invention by saying "Not yet!".
As you say, this subsequently applied in the case of flintlocks.
But, yeah, everything exists as part of an ecosystem and if you're not at the right time, your brilliant idea probably won't fly. I've been an IT analyst off and on for many years and I've seen this happen often.
For context: I know a number of PhD's, MD's, and notable programmers.