James Gleick's "The Toll of the Clock", a review of David Rooney's "About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks" in the 23 September 2021 issue of the "New York Review of Books", reminded me of something that I hadn't thought of in ages: when I was child, I could "call time" by dialing a telephone number whose only purpose was to say what time it was. As I took this for granted as just something that one could do, I never considered that, as Gleick recounts, it had a history: "In the early days of telephones, operators discovered that people were phoning them up just to ask the time." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 12 September 2021)
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