The Art of Distraction
Creativity, memory and our relationship with time
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I was led down a wonderfully distracting rabbit hole last week by Dr Rebecca Struthers, whose recently published book The Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History charts the history of watches and timekeeping. It’s one of those books where you find yourself googling ideas and images as you’re reading, and it led me into some geeky nooks and crannies on the internet. Her book is a brilliant example of rich history-writing that reaches into many subject areas because it examines the past through an unexpected lens — in this case a history of time told through some of the ingenious devices humans have invented to measure it.
Mechanical watches emerged relatively recently, in the last 600 years or so, but there is evidence that attempts at timekeeping have been ongoing over the past 44,000 years. It’s a fascinating story of technological development and it’s also a cultural and social history of Europe…
