Carl Linnaeus’s Flower Clock

“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had both combated and complicated the problem by inventing timekeeping and with it, in a deep sense, the modern world.

The first clocks were a revolution, a revelation, a civilizing force. The young saw them as a form of rebellion against their provincial, blinkered elders. One teenager wrote:

When man...