Career
He was a member of the Birmingham Philosophical Institution (BPI) (Honorary Secretary of the Junior Department in 1841), the Royal Society, and the Birmingham and Midland Institute (BMI).
Shortly after giving lectures on chronology in 1842 he provided an accurate display of local time based on astronomical measurements on a public clock in front of the Philosophical Institution in Cannon Street from which the church clocks were set. It was eventually synchronised to Greenwich Mean Time by electrical telegraph when the railway timetable became important. Later a number of clocks around Birmingham were linked by wire. The clock was transferred to the BMI when the BPI closed down in 1852. In 1883, he gave a clock and bells for the tower of the new Art Gallery, which was constructed in 1885. This clock, nicknamed Big Brum then acted as the town's timepiece, replacing an expensive network of clocks wired around the town.
Read more about this topic: A. Follett Osler
Famous quotes containing the word career:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)