A This exhibition will look back in history to see how we became so obsessed with time. The first section in the exhibition looks at an era when most people did not own or pay attention to clocks. Time was marked by the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the cycles of hunger and sleep. People ordered their lives by the changing seasons, religious events and by births and deaths. The Almanac played an important role in keeping track of time by using a system of elaborate tables of astronomical, seasonal and religious events.
Almanac is the most widely used.
More people found themselves governed by the regularity and pace of the clock. A critical period of change in how time was kept occurred in August 12, 1853. Two trains were headed toward each other on a single track. The conductor of one train thought there was enough time to switch tracks before the approaching train was scheduled to pass through. The train sped around a corner and collided head on with the other train killing fourteen passengers.