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This morning I got the 07.25 train into work. It left on time; it arrived on time. Not so unusual. But it got me thinking: accurate time-keeping is one of the fundamental aspects of the modern world – very little that we do would go half as well without it.

That’s why this week on A History of the World in 100 objects I’d like to focus on one object in particular: a nineteenth century marine chronometer.

This intricate combination of cogs, wheels, hands and numbers is perhaps one of the key inventions of the past 200 years. It allowed, for the first time, accurate time-keeping at sea. Sailors could now find their longitude by working out how far from the Greenwich-Meridian line in London they had travelled. This not only standardised time but was, quite literally, a life-saver.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many of the countries of Europe and the USA were undergoing the transformation from agricultural to industrial economies (popularly known as the Industrial Revolution). This process could not have happened without accurate time-keeping, as lead curator JD Hill explains:

It’s about having established structure, having standardised time. People are turning up to work at a certain time and leaving work at a certain time – that’s the industrial revolution: Clocking on and off work.

Our chronometer though has another cog to its works. It kept time on board HMS Beagle as it carried a young Charles Darwin across the world gathering the knowledge and inspiration to develop the theory of evolution.

While time was changing the world around Darwin, he, for the first time, described how it changed the world before him. The nineteenth century brought a revolution in thought just as it did on the ground.

Mechanised and more efficient production would bring increased wealth to the powers of Europe. Our Sudanese slit drum sheds light on the expansion of colonial empire at this time and most critically the scramble for the resources and territory of Africa.

Expanding empire is also a key theme in another of our objects – a tea set. The story of tea-drinking is tied inextricably to British endeavours overseas at this time, but it also speaks very interestingly of a shift back at home where mass-production techniques would change the way we considered and consumed newly affordable objects just like these.

A simple British penny stamped with the slogan ‘Votes for women’, reveals the story of one of the many movements for social and political reform that was born out of this modern world:

What we are seeing is that along with mass-production came mass politics. One of the manifestations of this was in the extension of the franchise. In other words: enabling more citizens to vote. While initially this was done on the basis of owning large amounts of property, the movement to extend this, irrespective of gender, is a key factor in the nineteenth century.

Away from Europe, Japan was also successfully embracing modernisation and emerging as an imperial, industrial power in its own right. The instantly recognisable print by Hokusai, The Great Wave, offers a fascinating view of a country caught between its isolationist past and open future.

This week we’re hearing about the world on the brink of the twentieth century. This is the period when we invented and got used to the idea of mechanisation, of standardisation, of production and of organisation on a hitherto unimaginable scale.