Time Factor

[moonbegger]

Hello all .

I think time was relevant to those who needed to keep it. [ie] The workplace clock for the worker , the station clock for the policeman ( ect ) It makes no sense for the worker to get to work 5 or 10 min's late by his work clock even if the clock in the local station says he is on time . So my guess is the clock at ground zero , where ever that may be , dictated the personal time of the individual .

The funny thing is , all these years later , loaded to the max with ground breaking technology, most people (including myself) still have a five minute gray area , as far as what the exact time is at any given moment

Just try asking 3 or 4 strangers , what the time is , you'll be surprised !

cheers ,

moonbegger

[Mr Lucky]

Hi Moon

I heartily agree

Hi everyone

One thing I will say if any of you have bought an old clock or watch and was surprised by how inaccurate it was, this isn’t a fair comparison to how it worked at the time it was made, in particular verge watches (these have very fat cases, and are sometimes known as “turnip watches” due to there shape) suffer greatly from wear, all of the power of main spring is carried through the escapement and after years of use these watches can be out hours per day.

[Barnaby]

I have at least seven "clocks" in my house: on the walls in my office and den, a clock on the microwave, an alarm clock in my bedroom, and timing devices on my cell phone, computer, and cable box (TV). Even in this day and age, my TV and cell clocks are off by a minute (different providers) and the range among all of my timing devices currently shows an eight minute disparity. Even in this day and age, at a practical level, what time is it?

[Mr Lucky]

I have tried to find the source for this but can’t, it’s something I read sometime ago -

The synchronising of London’s clocks was a job done by a group of old ladies dressed in black carrying small wooden boxes containing particularly accurate clocks known as chronometers, The widows would arrive each morning at Greenwich Observatory and take from the great astronomical clocks there an accurate reading of the time and adjust the time shown on their state of the art marine chronometers that they were carrying to match exactly. The chronometers would be carried in a binnacle type housing and covered so that the time couldn’t be read.

They would then travel around and make their living ’selling time’. Any one who wanted to know accurate GMT would pay a fee and were then allowed to look at the face of the chronometer and transfer the time to their own clock.

The last of these women only stopped working in the 1920’s/30’s replaced by the time signal broadcast by the BBC.

------------

Care and maintenance of your weight driven, long pendulum gravity escapement clock -

These clocks are usually 8-day, so once a week the weigh driving them is winched up to the top of the clock tower.

If your clock is running too fast (ie if your clock is striking too early compared to others near by) or too slow, its rate can be adjusted accordingly. There would be provision for this built into the clock by its maker (adding or removing small weights to/from the gravity arm is one method)

Some may need oiling/greasing every few years or so to prevent wear.

That’s about it.

[moonbegger]

Hello Mr Lucky ,

Great post , very interesting .

They would then travel around and make their living ’selling time’. Any one who wanted to know accurate GMT would pay a fee and were then allowed to look at the face of the chronometer and transfer the time to their own clock.

Is it not beyond the realms of possibility that an enterprising con man, such as a Victorian Del boy could set up his own operation, Impersonating the authentic time sellers , peddling a not so accurate time source , Could there have been an market for selling fake time ?

moonbegger .

[Mr Lucky]

Could there have been an market for selling fake time ?

Hi Moon , thanks

Ha-ha. You might be on to something -

'I'll soon get my doss money , see what a jolly marine chronometer I've got now!'

[Cogidubnus]

Mr Lucky I salute you!



Every good wish

Dave

[RivkahChaya]

Hello Phil. On the other hand, a good Met inspector would ask of a witness, "By what did you fix the time?

I wonder whether people tended to report the last bell they heard before an incident, or the first bell after. I'd assume that latter, because after you heard something like a person scream, you'd tend to be more alert for a little while, and paying attention to things like the clock bell, but then, people who depended on bells may have had a capacity for registering the detail without consciously thinking about it, the way we stop for stoplights without really processing "red means stop."

I have said before that I grew up in an English cathedral town where the bells told the time every hour and at each quarter. You always knew the time roughly - i.e.e to the nearest quarter hour

I'm sure most witnesses relied on bells, because all the times are reported in quarter hours. No witness reports something happening at "8:36," or even in tenths of hours.

I think it was Lynn who pointed out that a person could misremember or lose track, and get the time wrong by an entire hour-- in other words, be correct that it was a quarter after, but think it was a quarter after eight, rather than a quarter after nine.

Public clocks, of which there were many more in those days - depended on whomever kept them running. If their watch was slow or fast the brewery/stable/jeweller or whatever clock would be out by a similar amount. Clocks can also go wrong and not be noticed for a while.

I remember before everyone used a cell phone to keep track of time, and even though most adults wore watches, there were a lot of public clocks displayed. Most banks had one, and department stores usually had one displayed some place. The banks and courthouses had the exterior ones that people relied on, though, and they could differ by as much as ten minutes. There was a bank on the courthouse square where I went to high school, that was about seven minutes faster than the courthouse clock. They were about 30 yards apart. And they remained that way for years, so clearly each one had some source it trusted.

I always wondered about the witnesses who awoke in the middle of the night, and claimed they heard something at a specific time. Now, I suppose it's possible some of them owned clocks, and it's also possible they happened to be awake to hear the hour bell. But similarly, it's possible to be groggy, and not fully awake, and hear the hour chime for three am, then the half-hour chime for three-thirty, and think it's two am.

Also, and this is going way out in speculation-land, but most people have a bit of an internal clock, so when they wake up at night, they have a rough idea of what time it is; I'm generally accurate within about 90 minutes, and when I'm sick, I often entirely lose sense of time when I'm asleep, especially when I have a fever, so I think there really may be a facet of homeostasis that makes us vaguely aware of how much time has passed.

However, I don't know anyone who really can tell the time to the minute, or even quarter of an hour after not looking at a clock for several hours, but I know a few people who think they can. Is it possible that some of the witnesses were over-reliant on their ability just to know what time it was in the middle of the night?

Anecdote: I remember a story someone insisted was true, where witness to a crime fixed time because he woke up after falling asleep in front of the TV, and when he woke up, Johnny Carson was on, so it must have been after 11:30pm (the Late Show in the US-- very famous here). It turned out, and this is how the defendant won on appeal, that the night of the crime, Carson had a special on from 9-11pm.

That doesn't sound like an appeals issue, but it may have been a way of impeaching a witness on cross, that blew up into a "better" story. I think it's funny that as recent ago as when the Carson Late Show was on, it was believable that people would use something like that to fix time in a criminal case.

[Cogidubnus]

My paternal grandparents lived in Dyke Road Drive Brighton, directly under the embankment of the LBSCR/SR Brighton to London main line railway, just south of Lovers Walk junction...I remember them always having a pretty fair estimate of time from the trains rumbling by, and from the whistled signals made to the signal box at the top of the road...

My grandmother in particular was very adept at this (I suppose because she spent more time at home than my grandfather)...

I have to confess it's this circumstance which makes me more sympathetic towards a certain witness in the Polly Nicholls case!

All the best

Dave

[RivkahChaya]

Off-topic, but I grew up in New York City, and people give directions there by cross street. It's fairly easy to stay oriented by landmarks, and the blocks are very even, so twenty blocks is a mile for the numbered streets, or 10 for the avenues.

If you plop me down in the middle of nowhere, I have no idea which way is North, and if I start walking, very little idea how far I've walked. I'm amazed at how people in Indiana, who grew up here, just know these things. You ask for directions, and they'll say "Go a mile East, then two and a half miles North." No landmarks. No street names. But they can do that-- someone else from the area can follow that, without a compass or odometer.

Anyway, people back then may have needed a general sense of time, and maybe paid attention to the position of the sun, or things they didn't even realize they paid attention to. So they may have estimated better than we did, but still, not down to the minute.

[lynn cates]

psychological

Hello Rivkah. Thanks.

"I wonder whether people tended to report the last bell they heard before an incident, or the first bell after. I'd assume that latter, because after you heard something like a person scream, you'd tend to be more alert for a little while, and paying attention to things like the clock bell, but then, people who depended on bells may have had a capacity for registering the detail without consciously thinking about it, the way we stop for stoplights without really processing "red means stop." "

Yes, there are psychological reasons for our attentiveness. I have heard my university clock strike before, and I sometimes confused the quarter with the three-quarter hour.

Cheers.
LC

[RivkahChaya]

I would love to know whether McCarthy had an office clock. It would be so good to know whether Bowyer was basing his estimation of the time he saw MJK's body on a clock he saw before he left the office, or a bell he heard after.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but in English books I've read written in the early 20th c., people used to have some morning snack they referred to as "elevenses," or something. For all I know, you still do, I'm just not reading much fiction released in the UK recently. I was just thinking if there was something people typically did at 11am, and there was a clock in the office, there was good reason for Bowyer to glance at it before he left.

I dunno. Schools and employers would love to figure out a way to stop giving us lunch breaks in the US. As it is, school kids get 20 minutes. I was amazed to find out kids in Australia get tea breaks. An American friend was complaining about her daughter no being able to go to the bathroom during school (yes, this is an actual real problem here; another friend of mine had to get a doctor's note so her 12-year-old daughter would be allowed to go to the bathroom when she needed to, and she had nothing wrong with her-- she just couldn't go from 7:55am until 2:35pm without peeing), and an Australian friend said "Can't she go on her tea break?" We stared at her, then started laughing. Poor thing. She had no idea why.

[Chava]

RivkahChaya, I doubt 'elevenses' were going at that time. I think it was something that took root somewhere around the 1950s. I doubt Bowyer would have timed his mid-morning snack--should he have taken one--that closely.

However the point about timing, as has been noted, concerns all the murders. We can't know how Lizzie Prater timed her Tiddles-related wake-up-call. We don't know how Sarah Lewis timed her visit to Millers Court. We don't know how Hutchinson timed his sighting of MJK (if in fact there was such a sighting!). Given that, a lot of stuff falls apart a little but it doesn't, in my opinion, fall apart a lot. Chapman was likely around in the half-light of the early morning in Hanbury Street. MJK was likely dead by the time dawn began to break and I believe was certainly murdered in the small hours at a time of complete darkness otherwise her killer wouldn't have needed the light of that fire. Nicholls was likely killed at a similar time. Eddowes left a police station so the cop who let her out probably noted the time fairly accurately and she was dead no more than 40 minutes later. Stride was killed even earlier at a time when a lot of people were on the streets and her body was found very shortly after her death.

I think the time factor is more important here in Chapman's murder since there is still controversy over when she was killed. But I guess my original point is that Long and Cadoche may not contradict each other as much as they appear to!

[RivkahChaya]

I was thinking about Caroline Maxwell and Bowyer. Since we don't know how they figured the time, Maxwell could have mistaken 8:45 for 8:15, or even 7:45, or could remember hearing the 9am bell after seeing Kelly, but not heard the 8:45 bell, for some reason, so she assumed the sighting was before 9am, but after 8:45, when it was really 8:35.

Bowyer reports "being sent" to 13 Miller's court at 10:45, but the coroner was already sent for at 11, according to the police report. That's what makes me think there was a clock in the office, and it was running fast, or at least quite out of sync with whoever kept time for the police. It's also possible that the police recorder used a bell, and depended on Bowyer's report for the hour.

Anyway, it might seem like 1hr, 45 minutes is too brief for the murder to happen, if it happened in the late morning, especially when you account for the man getting into the room, the lighting of the fire, gathering all evidence of himself afterwards, etc., and it might be, although it also might be that it doesn't take as much time as you'd think (I remember reading some place that experienced slaughterhouse workers can take apart a cow in six minutes).

So, my point, and I do have one, is that allowing for the fact that people could have been off easily by fifteen minutes, and even half an hour, the murder could have taken place in the morning, with the killer having, in fact, more than two hours.

I prefer this as an answer to the question of how Caroline Maxwell could have seen MJK in the morning, over ideas of MJK surviving, and the body being misidentified. Of course, Maxwell simply being wrong is even more possible.

But, If Kelly actually died at, say, 8:45am, and the body was not examined until 1pm, and during part of the time, the room was overheated, then it's plausible that rigor was just beginning to set in. Rigor began when Kelly actually died, not when the killer left the room.

[moonbegger]

Hello Chava ,

I think the time factor is more important here in Chapman's murder since there is still controversy over when she was killed. But I guess my original point is that Long and Cadoche may not contradict each other as much as they appear to!

Whatever he heard it was not the murder , and whenever she saw, what she claimed to see, it was not the Killer with chapman . I think this is still the best evidence that Dr Philips was right and witnesses confused about TOD .

Dr. Brown stated that he was called to Mitre Square shortly after 2:00 a.m. and arrived there at around 2:20. By this time Catherine Eddowes had been dead for roughly forty minutes. Brown observed that "the body had been mutilated, and was quite warm - no rigor mortis." We can thus say that, after roughly forty minutes, a body with extensive mutilations that was found under cool outdoor conditions was examined and described as being "quite warm." How do we reconcile this with the idea that the body of Annie Chapman was found to be almost completely cold after only the passing of twenty more minutes? We can't. It is very difficult to believe that in under twenty minutes almost all body heat would have dissipated into the morning air. This would be the work of a couple of hours, not minutes. Again, that observation is more in line with Dr. Phillips' opinion as to the time of death of Annie Chapman.

cheers

moonbegger .