Time is a fundamental concept that we typically take for granted in our everyday lives. Rarely do we look at our wristwatch and think how seconds, minutes and hours came to take on such importance. Even less do we reflect on all the work that goes into making seconds, minutes and hours appear as something as natural as the world around us.

What is time? How is it we have come to order our lives in such regulated and precise ways? How has our conception of time changed throughout history? The idea to reflect upon such weighty questions emerged at a conference organized by the British Society for the History of Science on the subject of ‘space’ held at the University of Kent in 1994. It seemed to many participants that the topic of time would make an equally interesting subject for a meeting. In particular, one question came to the fore: did space dominate time or time dominate space? In the event it took the dawning of a new century to provide the impetus, excuse and opportunity to organize a meeting to discuss such matters. It also quickly became clear that other historical societies and institutions had similar aims. The result was a joint three-day meeting, co-organized by the BSHS, the Royal Historical Society and the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, held at the impressive Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool, in September 1999.

This unprecedented coalition demonstrated the importance and productivity of bringing together historians of different backgrounds and interests. The bridging of traditional boundaries was also symbolized by Ludmilla Jordanova's unique position as both president of the BSHS and vice-president of the Royal Historical Society. The whole event, not surprisingly, attracted significant media attention and was deemed by all concerned a great success. This special issue of the BJHS is a small sample of the diversity and richness that characterized the meeting.

Commemoration is a theme to which historians are paying increasing attention, especially to its manifestations in the twentieth century and in relation to war. The formal remembrance of science is an important historical phenomenon, which demands approaches that take account of its distinctive and highly complex relationships with public life. Over the last four hundred years, peer groups and specialized institutions have sought to celebrate selected achievements and to bring those achievements to wider audiences. This address discusses some of the devices and ideas by means of which innovations were turned into cultural items that could be disseminated. Such items included portraits and monuments. As its main examples, the address uses Edward Jenner and vaccination, and the marking of anniversaries.

Places and anniversaries can function as ‘sites of memory’, but three major Newtonian locations – Cambridge, Grantham and London – were also sites of conflict that resonated with wider debates about the nature of genius and the conduct of science. Ritualized celebrations at appropriate times and places helped not only to establish Newton's status as a local hero, national exemplar and scientific genius, but also to promote various versions of national and scientific heritage. By examining changes in how Newton has been commemorated, this paper explores ways in which different protagonists have contributed to and benefited from legendary visions of Newton.

This paper sets out to examine the various temporal frameworks that made up the discourse of early modern natural philosophy. It takes into account a range of views and debates such as the comparison between the achievements of ancients and moderns, belief in the gradual decay of the earth and/or the cyclical nature of time, appreciation of recent improvements in the material conditions of life (especially technology), and projections of future techno-scientific progress, adherence to the doctrine of the prisca sapientia, and Judaeo-Christian notions of apocalypse and future redemption. This analysis also embraces, as a matter of course, changes in the ways natural philosophers both appealed to and reconstituted authorities. I look at Francis Bacon's treatment of time, and at the various sources of his accounts of scientific modernity. I conclude by considering the situation in late seventeenth-century England, when conservative critics of the ‘new’ philosophy – and the Royal Society in particular – charged that the uprooting of natural knowledge from its traditional institutional contexts would pervert the purpose of philosophical knowledge. In turn, supporters of the new philosophy, having defensively compiled lists of modern inventions and scientific discoveries, were to recast the advent of scientific modernity as starting properly with the publication of the Principa Mathematica in 1687.

No doubt the greatest wits in each successive age have been forced out of their own course: men of capacity and intellect above the vulgar have been fain, for reputation's sake, to bow to the judgement of the time and the multitude; and thus if any contemplations of a higher order took light anywhere, they were presently blown out by the winds of vulgar opinion. So that Time is like a river that has brought down to us things light and puffed up, while those that are weighty and solid have sunk.

From its inception, Victorian commentators on the telegraph appeared fascinated by its apparent capacity to break down barriers of space and time. They waxed lyrical over the ways in which the telegraph would bring nations closer together, break down boundaries and foster commerce. They also eulogized the ways in which the telegraph could be used as a seemingly effortless instrument of discipline. A great deal of work was needed to uphold such fantasies and make the telegraph work. This paper highlights efforts to establish a telegraphic time signal from Greenwich as an example of the labour and management required to sustain such rhetoric. Finally, the paper focuses on the increasingly common metaphor linking the telegraph network and the nervous system. It suggests that the metaphor worked for the Victorians because both systems were held to operate through the instantaneous transmission of intelligence as a means of maintaining bodily and social discipline.

In the late 1960s teams of engineers working independently in Japan, Switzerland and the United States used newly created electronic components to completely reinvent the wristwatch. The products these groups developed instigated a global revolution in the watch industry and gave everyone, whether they needed it or not, access to the split-second accuracy once available only to scientists and technicians. This radical change in timekeeping technology was in the vanguard of a dramatic shift from a mechanical to an electronic world and raises important issues about technological change for scholars interested in late twentieth-century history. Examining the work of three teams of engineers, this paper offers a comparative approach to understanding how local differences in culture, economy, business structure and access to technological knowledge shaped the design of finished products and their acceptance by users.