The history of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich has been revised to coincide with the Millenium. Color illustrations and updated text tell the story of Greenwich from its foundations in 1676 to its present status as Longitude 0°, the world's Prime Meridian for measuring longitude and time. The book covers the importance of longitude for navigation and traces the history of Greenwich Time, the basis of universal time-keeping. The book is co-published with the National Maritime Museum, where Derek Howse was the former Head of Navigation and Astronomy.

Examines different aspects of time and how we measure it, including seasons, sundials, clocks, local and Greenwich mean time, the prime meridian, time zones, atomic clocks, months, years, and more.

Traces the astronomical, navigational, and timekeeping advances that led to the development of Greenwich time, the concept of longitude, and the designation of Greenwich as the prime meridian.

The turn of the 20th to the 21st century provides an excellent vista for a look into language, especially the English language, literature, cultures, economics and European studies. Several essays deal specifically with issues of the 1990s, but others provide a contrast by looking into issues of the 1890s and one looks at 1000 AD. This is an excellent book for an educated overview of what we can expect in the new century. Contributors debate the significance of the ends and beginnings of centuries and millennia and touch on the controversy over when these actually occur, the end of the 99 year or the end of the 00 year. As an example of its wide-ranging focus, literary interpretations of the millennium are analysed from the standpoint of social sciences and vice versa. The contributors were chosen not only for the quality of their individual work but for their capacity to offer unexpected new perspectives on a topical and much-debated theme.

Although the broad topic of time and literature in the long eighteenth century has received focused attention from successive generations of literary critics, this book adopts a radically new approach to the subject. Taking inspiration from recent revisionist accounts of the horological practices of the age, as well as current trends in ecocriticism, historical prosody, sensory history, social history, and new materialism, it offers a pioneering investigation of themes that have never previously received sustained critical scrutiny. Specifically, it explores how the essayists, poets, playwrights, and novelists of the period meditated deeply upon the physical form, social functions, and philosophical implications of particular time-telling objects. Consequently, each chapter considers a different device – mechanical watches, pendulums, sandglasses, sundials, flowers, and bells – and the literary responses of significant figures such as Alexander Pope, Anne Steele, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, and William Hazlitt are carefully examined.

This book makes accurate calendrical algorithms readily available for computer use.