Spring 2026
Dead Reckoning:
Space-Time Compression and 19th Century Shipping
By Adam Gilbreath
London:
The Ship as a Device
Timekeeping within London’s history has been utilised to optimise labour and organise a more economically productive public. As the pace and speed of production increase, the efficiency of the dissemination of time must match it. This is exemplified within the relationship between the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and the cargo ship (specifically the sailing ship and steamship within the time frame explored). The Royal Observatory was set up in part to optimise trade through the administration of time and the development of navigational charts for English ships. The observatory, from its conception, has been linked to the development of English maritime trade.1
Within this relationship, the cargo ship can be viewed as a specific architecture that is developed as both a timekeeping device and a space-shrinking device. Each of these views is optimised by a specific set of variables that we will make the argument through.
As a space-shrinking device, the ship is defined by the speed at which it can travel and the cargo capacity that it can carry. The ship can generate more revenue faster so that it can move more resources across a set distance. The speed at which this exchange happens is then directly related to the perceived distance between two points in the world. We do not perceive distance as an individual; instead, we perceive the time elapsed and energy exerted. To me, the distance to my friend’s flat is dictated by physical time and exertion to get there, and I have no idea how far away it is outside of these metrics. My body has no way to understand distance, outside of post-rationalisation of other experiences. The same can be said for the way that humans conceptualise larger distances, at the scale of international trade. The ship then affects how we perceive the space of the world as it dictates the time and exertion needed to reach a given point. Any increase or decrease in the speed and exertion it takes to make it from London to Cape Town would be registered as an increase or decrease in perceived distance.
As a timekeeping device, the ship’s time is specific to its locality, however also continually compared to the time at the Royal Observatory (for the time frame of this paper). Timekeeping aboard the ship is utilised for navigation. Navigation is done through comparison; by comparing specific measurements of the time astral bodies cross the ship’s local meridian to previously known and documented measurements of the same in Greenwich. These measurements were kept in navigational charts aboard the ship. The exact location of the ship can then be calculated from the difference between these measurements. The ship’s location is then constantly assessed by its specific temporality. Space in this sense is dictated by time. The time used to compare measurements at sea is set while in port on the River Thames.
Timekeeping on the Thames
Captain: I don’t miss the walk. But maybe I miss the formalities, the conversation and ritual of walking to the observatory every trip and syncing my watch to theirs. Now, with the time ball, when we set out, I am always struck by the distance of time. How time is kept up on that hill for us out here on the Thames.
I can’t help but feel like we’ve lost something, I am so far from the instrument, the measure, the experience of time. But then again for the crew it must have always been this. The deckhands only see the sun and hear the hour from my lips.
First Mate: That has always been the case, even when you walked. There is a certain point where the chronometer doesn’t seem like it’s keeping time for anything. I know the clock would read right in Greenwich, but when it reads noon as the sun sets for us, it’s then that time feels so distant to me.
C: If it weren’t for the chronometer, we wouldn’t even know... the days would change so slow that noon would always feel right where it always was.
Wind at 10 knots from the west, commercial docks, June 18, 1834.
Within Greenwich meantime was distributed originally by sending the captain with their clock (or chronometer) to the Royal Observatory to check it is accurate in person. It was not until the invention of the time ball that this system was changed. The time ball set on top of the Royal Observatory and visible to most of the docklands would be dropped at 1 pm every day. The ships waiting in the river would sync their clocks to the drop of the ball before they set out to sea. The Royal Observatory had the role of ensuring the timekeeping devices and clocks of all the ships in the Thames were properly synced, or at least all ships that were navigated by the Greenwich meridian. While this method of timekeeping was widely used after the chronometer became commonplace, it was not the first method of navigation or, more specifically, for finding longitude.
At Sea:
Navigation Pre-Chronometer
C: When I first started sailing, we would get our bearing based on dead reckoning alone. We had no need to bother winding up the chronometer, but then we were always some amounts of human error away from knowing where we were at any given moment.
F: Even today, we take measurements of our time here as best we can, but it is impossible with the human eye and the sextant alone to find true noon. We could be anywhere in a 4-mile radius of the point we mark on the charts.
C: and with nothing on the horizon but more sea, we have no other means of knowing our location.
Wind at 16 knots from south-southwest, June 23, 1834
Longitude was originally calculated by using the ship’s dead reckoning. A measurement based on the exact speed, direction of travel, and drift from wind of a ship. Through these measurements, the location of the ship can be calculated. This, however, presented problems as many variables were at play, and even minor mistakes in the measurements played out over a lengthy voyage can result in large errors when locating a ship.2 Latitude could be calculated with relative ease using the elevation of astral bodies from the horizon, and comparing this to known measurements at other latitudes. However, any drift to the east or west could easily be miscalculated and imprecise using dead reckoning.3 This inefficiency within navigation posed a problem to the efficiency of a rapidly industrialising empire. The theoretical solution to this problem was to find a way to accurately measure the local time on a ship and compare it to the local time at another fixed and known location. When the chronometer, or a clock usable at sea, comes into use, this theory becomes common practice. But this was not the case until the 1850s. For our first examples, the ships were navigated based on dead reckoning.
The Tonnage Act and Dead Reckoning
1833-1852
In 1773, the Tonnage Act was created by Parliament; this act sets the methods by which the taxation of ships in English ports is done. Ships were taxed based on their tonnage or the total amount of cargo that they are capable of carrying. From 1773 to around 1854, this act would heavily influence the manner in which ships were constructed. The tonnage of a ship at the time was defined in the act by the following equation:
As length and breadth are the only measurements used to calculate tonnage, ships at the time would focus on deepening the hold without changing the length or breadth. Allowing a greater amount of untaxed goods to be carried by the ships at the expense of speed and stability.4
The changes this brought about to ship design are exemplified in figures 1-3, where the first ship, The Black Diamond, is designed before the enactment of the tonnage act, while the latter two increasingly subscribe to the wording of the act, or at least the circumvention of it. This results in the bulbous, top-heavy section that we see in The Emperor (Figure 3). Each successive ship in the timeline increases its depth without increasing the breadth. Each example here has one more deck than the last, from a hold and a top deck in The Black Diamond, to a hold, middeck, and top deck in the Prince of Wales, to three decks by the time The Emperor was constructed. The keel of the ship, or the ridge along the bottom, also slowly disappears as the ships widen. The resulting ship is top- heavy, unstable, and slower than the best designs possible at the time; however, it is capable of carrying large amounts of cargo and decreasing the amount of tonnage as measured by the law, thus making up for any inefficiencies by decreasing financial losses through taxation.
The losses here were not negligible even with the circumvention of the law; the amount of goods going in and out of London from 1760 to 1850 increased around 600% from 560,000 tons to 3,900,000 tons per decade. Trade at this time was increasing at a stable rate, almost doubling the total tonnage of imports and exports every decade, even excluding the total tonnage that was not documented under the tonnage act.5
Despite the large amounts of cargo moving in and out of England. The movement of goods still happened at a relatively slow pace. Most ships at this time were made from wood and were powered through sails; steamships had been invented; however, the steam engine was not efficient enough to make it financially viable for long-distance trade. The amount of room needed to store coal would fill most of the cargo hold, and so there was little room left over for any commodities. Without the widespread adoption of steamships, ships leaving England would have to first follow the coast down to the equator along the coast of Africa before cutting across the Atlantic towards Brazil, to then catch winds that would carry them towards the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Town. Return journeys would follow the coast of Africa before cutting towards the Caribbean and looping slightly north as they head back towards England. These longer routes were made necessary by the wind patterns, and despite the additional length added to the voyage, it was still faster for sailing ships to have the favourable winds the whole way.
This routing had the effect of shifting the way in which global trade occurred and which ports would see the most trade. Ports that were located along the trade winds would see more trade than those without direct routes along them. Cape Town was located particularly well as all leaving and returning journeys to anywhere in the Indian Ocean or Southeast Asia would round the Cape of Good Hope, passing Cape Town along the way. While port cities along South America and Africa would only see ships heading in one direction.6
This constructed a perception of space and distance that was based around the speed of sailing ships and the circuitous routes necessitated by wind patterns.o be carried. Steamship development would not stop over this, and they would be used along the coast of England, where they could make frequent coal stops. At this time, the speed at which a ship could move was largely dictated by the trade winds, forcing trips along circuitous routes to have favourable winds along the journey.7 The technology for optimising these routes and freeing them from the winds was there; however, it was just not financially feasible at this time.
Navigation at this time was largely done by using dead reckoning. So, ships would be forced onto longer routes and longer journeys utilizing a navigational system that was incredibly prone to error. The ships at the time were unsteady as they were optimised for tax evasion and so were difficult to control in the open ocean, where most of the journey would happen. Since navigation was done via dead reckoning, there was no need for timekeeping within navigation, and thus the ship operated solely based on its local time. The ship would have a shifting local time throughout its journey, as the ship moved around the world, the day would shift, but the difference would be negligible at the speed it moved.
The Treatise on Tonnage and Chronometers
1852-1874
C: Do you think about how far away the time is in Greenwich? That it could be noon here four hours after the marine clock says it’s so back home?
F: there’s an odd sense of distance to it... Because there’s the distance, but then there’s the knowledge that as we travel our days are shifting, and we drift from the waking and sleeping of those we left behind. And I felt nothing of it as it happened, every day I wake with the sun a minute, maybe two, earlier and now I am hours adrift in time... which is to say I do think about it, why do you bring it
C: It’s just without time we might be lost, but I also feel slightly lost in time...
F: I would try not to let it get to you... To much thinking about time feels like a recipe for melancholy...
Wind at 14 knots from the northwest, June 30, 1834.
The Treatise on tonnage, written in 1853, highlighted how old and sluggish the English fleet had become, as it was still constrained by laws written in the late 18th century.8 As a result of this paper, new laws were written and put into effect. The new Merchant Shipping Act, enacted in 1854, required ships to measure and report tonnage based on breadth, width, and depth. Freed from the constraints of tax loopholes, British ships began to embrace modern sailing technologies and focus on speed as well as cargo capacity.9
Through this shift (Figures 4 and 5), the newly constructed Neumuhlen begins to have a deeper keel, focusing on stability as opposed to tonnage within the design. And by 1858, with The Northam (Figures 6 and 7), the keel had fully returned to the deeper keel design. This increased stability at sea and created a fast and stable ship that would dominate long-distance trade around the Cape of Good Hope to Asia and India.10
The Aries (Figures 8 and 9) is the first fully iron ship within the selected case studies. As the materials utilised in ship building transition from wood to metal construction, the keel again disappears. The keel experienced a brief resurgence with changes in tonnage legislation before quickly becoming outdated with new metal shipbuilding technologies and disappearing from metal ship designs. At this point, the steamship (or any metal ship) was not efficient for long-distance journeys, as the bottom would foul, and it would become sluggish. After only a few months at sea, the entire bottom would have oxidised, and they would not solve this for a number of years. However, the steam engine and shipbuilding technologies had become good enough to allow steamships to dominate Atlantic and European trade from England.11
From the combined shipping from both steam and sail in 1850, England saw a tonnage of 7,650,000 enter and exit its ports, which would increase to 23,000,000 tons by 1870.12 As technology and the pace of global trade increased, the global market expanded and became more intertwined.13 This was aided in part by marine Chronometers becoming widely used at this time.
Radically changing the way in which a ship navigates in the open sea. The chronometer was invented in the mid-17th century; however, it wasn’t until the mid-18th century that its use was commonplace with seafaring vessels. The chronometer allowed the ship to carry time with it while at sea.14 Specifically, they would carry Greenwich mean time with them; by knowing the time it was in Greenwich, they could compare the local time to it based on observations made at sea. This invention allowed the theory of calculating longitude at sea based on time to become possible and efficient. While sailing vessels still had to keep to the routes that followed the trade winds, they at least now had a greater accuracy in knowing where they were. With the guesswork of longitude removed, the efficiency of trade increased.15
The English sailing ship now exists in a constant state of comparison with Greenwich. Its location is only known because the movement of the sun and stars at Greenwich is known. The dilation and shift of time on the ship become a defining feature of the space that the ship occupies. As ships’ speed increases, the perception of distance decreases. While simultaneously, it is only through its movement in time, and how that relates to heavenly bodies, that the movement is measurable. The perception of distance decreases, while the perception of an increasingly abstract notion of time increases.
The Dawn of Steam and Temporal Alienation
1874-1881
C: I swear every time I do this trip it gets shorter...
F: I mean it does get shorter; the ships get faster, we navigate better we get there in less time.
C: But the distance too. To move here was unthinkable, the time it would’ve taken, but now visiting family in England would be almost easy, certainly a trip I could make every three years...
F: I guess it does feel closer to home...
Wind at 10 knots from the north, July 14, 1834.
In 1874, there was a brief resurgence in the use of sailing ships because they made better time on longer trips than steamships. But by 1876, steamships were the dominant means of moving cargo across the globe. This is solidified in 1881 with the invention of a triple- expansion engine capable of operating at high enough pressures to make long-distance travel financially feasible. The new engine needed considerably less coal and thus freed up enough cargo space so that steamships were faster, could take a more direct route, and could carry a comparable amount of cargo to the sailing ship.16 The steamship had the advantage of not needing to route itself by the trade winds and instead could take the most efficient route to the destination. This, paired with the at this point ubiquitous use of the chronometer, allowed for trade to reach a fever pitch in comparison to past years. In 1870, 23,000,000 tons of cargo moved in and out of English ports, which increased to 35,200,000 tons by 1880.17 An increase of about 10,000,000 in a single decade.
This increase was aided in part by new designs for steamships (Figures 11 to 18). The availability of documentation for these ships is also better than some of the older examples, and so we will look more closely at the specifics of their design. The newer steamships all have a central boiler and engine room, and two cargo holds, one on either side of the engine and boiler. Shafts would open to the top deck, where cargo could then be lowered with lifts into the holds. In this section, the bottoms of the ships become flatter, and space for ballast increases to increase stability. The metal ships also use tanks of water ballast as opposed to stacking rocks or other weights into the bottom. The flatter bottom allows for more efficient stacking of cargo. The ships are taller than previous ones, also increasing the maximum amount of cargo that can be carried.18 Crew quarters and accommodations are positioned in small cabins on the top deck. The ship becomes engineered towards moving as many goods as possible, a trajectory that has been shared by all the examples. The most prominent spaces are allocated towards propulsion or carrying goods. This is exemplified in the most modern of the examples, The Mimosa (Figures 17 and 18). In the transition from older designs to the Mimosa (Figures 11 to 16), the designs first look very similar to the older sailing vessels, specifically in section, before departing and utilising the newer materials and technologies to optimise the design. The boats are becoming taller, and the bottoms are becoming flatter; the whole ship takes on a boxier shape than its forebears.
These changes in the methods of shipping shifted the way in which the ports of the world were interacted with. Ports that were not along the routes favoured by the trade winds were suddenly accessible, and at a faster rate than ever. And inversely, ports that used to be a very sensible stop along the routes of the trade wind would be passed by in favour of more direct routes. Slowly, the hierarchy of ports across the world began to shift. Trade becomes faster, and previously isolated ports become accessible, or at least accessible via a direct route. The seas become dominated by ships whose local time and speed dictate their location and distance to their end goal. This only further emphasised the relationship between the ship and the Royal Observatory. The result is the need for a standardisation of the navigational meridian for an increasingly international shipping operation.
Port:
Timekeeping at Cape Town and Ties Home
C: We would never know...
F: Never know what exactly?
C: How far away home is. Or at least our home time. If we didn’t carry our time with us from Greenwich to here. To us, nothing would’ve happened. I don’t feel it.
F: I don’t either. But we know it, that ball drops 2 hours after the ball comes back home. Our day flexed and shifted around, but the sun never stopped rising or setting. Or never felt like it moved more than a second or two out of place...
C: I know the day still governs our time, but it feels farther and farther away... And the clock sounds louder and louder... it’s all just measurements now, time moves to tell me where I am.
Wind at 13 knots from the north, July 22, 1834.
Greenwich meantime, by 1884, was adopted across the globe as the standard for all timekeeping. In part because the vast majority of nautical charts and almanacs already used Greenwich time.19 And to restructure the methods of maritime navigation around another meridian or another time would be too large an undertaking. Timekeeping for maritime vessels began to have infrastructure built around the world to maintain these new standards.
One of these infrastructures is the time ball in Cape Town, built in 1894. The time ball positioned by the harbour in view of the boats would be dropped every day at 1 pm. Dropping 2 hours after the time ball in Greenwich drops. This time ball was, like Greenwich in the docklands, also used to sync the chronometers of the ships in Cape Town, allowing for them to compensate for any difference in time that their chronometers may have accrued during the voyage.20 The Cape Town time ball operates as a temporal pit stop, allowing the ships to “top up” on their time before they continue their voyage. This is one point in a global network of infrastructure created around the movement of cargo that was built to structure and disseminate time. The spatial restructuring of the world through naval vessels is paired with temporal infrastructure relating to the timekeeping devices in Greenwich.
The fabric of the world shrank through the development of global timekeeping and maritime technologies. Distances to faraway ports become increasingly attainable and reachable because of the increase in the speed of travel. As the perceived time it takes to reach any given location decreases, so does our perception of distance. The space of the world becomes defined by time.21 And thus, the shrinking of space is in part tied to the relationship of a given ship’s local time and the world’s time to that of Greenwich. Through the strict measurement of time carried out in Greenwich, and the ability to execute the same at sea, the speed of travel these ships exhibit is made possible. This shared awareness of time and acceleration of the speed of travel constructed the shared perception of distance and the space that defined the world.
Reference:
Harvey, David. Time Space Compression and The Post Modern Movement.
Howse, Derek. Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude. 1980. (Internet Archive)
Homes, Caitlin. “The Astronomer Royal, the Hydrographer and the Time Ball: Collaborations in Time Signalling 1850-1910.” The British Journal for the History of Science 42, no. 3 (2009): 381–406. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25592275.
Moorsom Esq., G. “Treatise on Tonnage”. 1853. https://navalmarinearchive.com/research/docs/moorsomtonnage.html
Graham, Gerald S. “The Ascendancy of the Sailing Ship 1850-85.” The Economic History Review 9, no. 1 (1956): 74–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/2591532.van Rossum, Matthias. “Changing Tides: Maritime Labour Relations in Europe and Asia.”
Usher, Abbott Payson. “The Growth of English Shipping 1572-1922.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 42, no. 3 (1928): 465–78. https://doi.org/10.2307/1884787.
Pascali, Luigi. “The Wind of Change: Maritime Technology, Trade, and Economic Development.” The American Economic Review 107, no. 9 (2017): 2821–54. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26527928.
Rossum, Matthias van. “Changing Tides: Maritime Labour Relations in Europe and Asia.” In Colonialism, Institutional Change, and Shifts in Global Labour Relations, edited by Karin Hofmeester and Pim de Zwart, 239–64. Amsterdam University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv62hdhw.11.
Qvrp. “Cape Town Heritage.” Time Ball Tower - Cape Town Heritage, www.cape-town-heritage.co.za/
Bibliography:
Crary, Johnathan. 24/7 Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep.
Smith, John. The True Nature of Time.
Thompson, E. P. Time work-dicipline and Industrial Capitalism.
Turner, Anthony. The Eclipse of the Sundials, Clocks, and Natural Time in the Late Seventeenth Century.
Al Naib, S. K. ed. Dockland: An Illustrated Historical Survey of life and work in East London. (Internet Archive)
Durand, Jean Nicolas Louis. Precis of the Lectures on Architecture.
“The Steam-Ship Great Britain.” Scientific American 1, no. 1 (1845). http://www.jstor.org/stable/24922004.
Notes:
1. Howse, Derek. Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude. 1980.
2. Homes, Caitlin. “The Astronomer Royal, the Hydrographer and the Time Ball: Collaborations in Time Signalling 1850-1910.”
3. Howse, Derek. Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude. 1980.
4. Graham, Gerald S. “The Ascendancy of the Sailing Ship 1850-85,” p.78.
5. Usher, Abbott Payson. “The Growth of English Shipping 1572-1922.”
6. Pascali, Luigi. “The Wind of Change: Maritime Technology, Trade, and Economic Development,” p. 2832.
7. Pascali, Luigi. Ibid. p.2832.
8. Moorsom Esq., G. “Treatise on Tonnage”. 1853.
9. Graham, Gerald S. “The Ascendancy of the Sailing Ship 1850-85,” p.78.
10. ibid. p.80.
11. Pascali, Luigi. ibid.
12. Usher, Abbott Payson. “The Growth of English Shipping 1572-1922.”
13. Rossum, Matthias van. “Changing Tides: Maritime Labour Relations in Europe and Asia.”
15. Pascali, Luigi. Ibid.
16. Graham, Gerald S. “The Ascendancy of the Sailing Ship 1850-85.”
17. Usher, Abbott Payson. Ibid.
18. Graham, Gerald S. Ibid.
19. Howse, Derek. Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude. 1980.
20. Qvrp. “Cape Town Heritage.”
21. Harvey, David. Time-Space Compression and The Post-Modern Movement.
Figures:
Esparto, 1880.
Esparto, 1880.