Sir

In her review of my book Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and the English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785(Nature 387, 468; 4681997), Kristen Lippincott warns readers that my thesis “seems to be somewhat flawed”. Her hesitancy is justified.

The flaw, she says, is this: I start from the observation that soon after Christiaan Huygens steadied clockwork's motion by inventing the pendulum regulator, the English language appears to have coined a phrase to describe the new clocks’ sound: tick, tick, tick (not tick-tock, the onomatopoeia we have grown used to since its first appearance about 150 years ago).

Lippincott's objection is that clocks don't really sound like that. The escapement's alternate beats differ from each other more markedly than tick, tick, tick suggests.

That is true. I say so in the book: the “sameness” voiced by tick, tick, tick is “fictional”, because “no successive impulses of the clock's escapement will actually sound identical” (page 8).

The phrase is the more striking because it is in part illusory; it emphasizes the new evenness of the intervals between the sounds over the quality of the sounds themselves. The first users of the phrase were (as Lippincott claims I am) “exaggerating to make a point”: that this was the way they newly imagined time to move — in small, steady increments — and that the new clocks were prompting them to imagine time this way.

Such imaginings have much to do, I try to show, with subsequent shapes of narrative, with the incremental, open-ended ways in which writers told stories of themselves and others, in the diaries, daily newspapers and other periodic forms that developed during the decades after Huygens’ innovation.

Perceptions are not the same thing as reality, but they have history and consequences of their own, worth chronicling.