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The longitude race was reborn in a twentieth-century version, as optimistic inventors designed devices to synchronize timepieces all over the world. Aiming to protect the fortunes they envisaged reaping, they applied for patents in Switzerland, center of the clock-making trade. And many of their designs landed on the desk of a philosophical physicist who was originally more interested in thermodynamics than in time — Patent Officer Albert Einstein.
- Patricia Fara, Science A Four Thousand Year History, 2009.