Timelines

     Astronomy was a passion of mine as a boy.  I built my own reflecting telescope from scratch, grinding the mirror in the cold basement of our house, and spent mosquito-ridden hours outside at night looking at the stars.  So naturally, while in London,I took the short boat ride to Greenwich to see the Royal Observatory.  When Britannia ruled the waves, her sailing ships needed a precise way of determining longitude.  Doing so requires accurate clocks on a ship and tables showing when certain stars should be directly overhead at various longitudes.  The Royal Observatory was established to service this need.  Its location became the zero meridian, and time all around the world, or at least all around the British empire upon which the sun never set, was measured from Greenwich Mean Time.  Tourists visiting the Observatory today pay 16 pounds for the privilege of entering the gates and standing with feet on each side of the zero meridian.  The importance of bestriding an invisible, artificial line escapes me.  So I asked an attendant about this.  He dismissed me at first by saying that if I wanted to see the meridian, I could bloody well pay the 16 pounds.  But when I pointed out that the zero meridian runs from the South Pole, through the Observatory in Greenwich, to the North Pole and that there are infinite points along the line where one can bestride it, he allowed as how the weather vane on top of the Observatory also had an arrow pointing north and so I could indeed stand astride the meridian outside the gates without charge.

The town of Greenwich and the Old Royal Naval College from the Observatory

     William Herschel constructed a very large reflecting telescope with a mirror that was 48 inches in diameter.  (Mine was six inches).  So when I saw a remaining fragment of the tube on the grounds of the Observatory, I naturally had to have my picture taken with it.