Clocking On

RADIO 4, 4.00PM

 Just as many of us head back to work after the long bank holiday weekend, professor Emma Griffin asks how we became slaves to the clock. Before industrialisation, working hours moved varied with the amount of daylight throughout the year and the agricultural cycle than by the time. But as more accurate ways of measuring time were developed and introduced – particularly in Victorian factories during the Industrial Revolution – the regulation of time became a way to regulate the workforce, too.