Keeping Time in a Georgian House
John C Taylor

• Wednesday 15 June 2016, 7.00PM to 9:00pm
• Tickets: £14 (£12 for YCT Members & Friends of Fairfax House. Tickets available from Fairfax House shop. 01904 655543
• Fairfax House (map)
• No wheelchair access

Event details

Revolutionary advances in timekeeping during the Georgian Age gave to the world new ways to calculate, co-ordinate and measure time. An affluent social elite, moving between parties and events at the theatre, racecourse and assembly rooms, demanded accurate timekeeping to regulate their activities. This made the ownership of a clock or watch not just a luxury commodity and symbol of status, but also a necessity.

Join John C Taylor - one of the world's most renowned inventors and foremost horologists - at Fairfax House, where he will explore the keeping of time in the Georgian House. Looking specifically within Fairfax House, he will suggest what clocks the Fairfax family might have owned, or were acquired by the Ninth Viscount, Charles Gregory Fairfax, to furnish his daughter's newly remodelled and fashionable townhouse on Castlegate.

About the speaker

Dr John C Taylor OBE FREng is one of the world's most prolific inventors.  His bi-metal thermostat controls in the humble kettle are used throughout the world over one billion times a day.  He is also the leading expert on the work of John Harrison, an early pioneer of timekeeping and sea clocks.  This led him to design and help build the Corpus Chronophage, a three metre-high clock that is displayed in an exterior wall of Corpus Christi College building at Cambridge University.

His company won four Queen’s Awards for Export and Innovation. Dr Taylor is no stranger to Fairfax House and lent his wooden Harrison precision longcase clock to the exhibition ‘Keeping Time' in 2013. More information at www.johnctaylor.com