You might find me on an aqueduct in Linlithgow or an airfield in Croydon. I could be at a clock tower in Kuala Lumpur or an underpass in Chicago. I will always be exploring.

I’m a British writer and museum curator. My latest book, About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, is out now with Viking (UK) and W. W. Norton (US), with eleven translation editions available or due soon. It is ambitious, wide-ranging and provocative, and it’s based on fifteen years of research into why civilizations make clocks and why we should understand them better.

Next up will be The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future, due June 2025 from Chatto & Windus (UK) and W. W. Norton (US). It’s a truly extraordinary story and I look forward to sharing it with you.

The writer and filmmaker Jonathan Meades said that my first book — a biography of the time-seller Ruth Belville I wrote back in 2008 — was “an engrossing and eccentric slice of London history ... constantly surprising, crisply written, beautifully detailed.” Patricia Fara in Nature said that “Rooney has the rare gift of combining the obsessiveness of an academic sleuth with the fluency of a detective novelist”.

Obsessiveness is certainly the word. Whatever subject I’m working on, I really get under its skin. I live it, breathe it, and explore its material remains. I care as much about fine detail as the big picture. Both are crucial in a good story. The history of time, transport, technology and engineering is the story of us, and I care deeply about it. I write on these topics in my free Substack newsletter, Rooney Vision.

Museum career

I joined the London Science Museum as a 21-year-old trainee in 1995 and I’ve spent my life in museums ever since. I cut my teeth as a junior curator on a big millennium gallery project, then moved into exhibition management for a bit. At the National Maritime Museum, from 2004 to 2009, I was Curator of Timekeeping. I returned to the Science Museum as Curator of Transport. Later I became Keeper of Technology and Engineering, a role with responsibility for ten specialist curators and one-third of the museum’s vast collection. I went freelance in 2018 and now work on content and vision with museums around the world.

“An exemplar project”

Among other projects, I was Lead Curator of the Science Museum’s RIBA-award-winning Mathematics: The Winton Gallery, designed by the celebrated Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid with a team led by Bidisha Sinha, which opened in 2016. The project was directed by Karen Livingstone, now a Deputy Director at the Fitzwilliam Museum, who kindly said that “David is a curator of great intelligence and flair, one of the best I have enjoyed the privilege of working with. He has a rare breadth and depth of knowledge and expertise which he is able to translate with ease and communicate in an accessible way.”

The gallery enjoyed widespread media acclaim, from Waldemar Januszczak in the Sunday Times and Mark Hudson in the Daily Telegraph to Jonathan Morrison in The Times and Will Gompertz on BBC News.

Will Gompertz, now Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, said that “the imaginative and instructive displays were put together by the Science Museum’s David Rooney. He has taken a calculated risk by privileging story-telling over pure maths, which won’t please everyone but I think — on balance — is a good decision.”

I took that risk because I wanted to reach everyone, not just those already into the subject. It seems this struck a chord with visitors, because the gallery was hugely popular from the day it opened. The RIBA award judges said, “This pioneering project has vastly increased visitor numbers ... and is an exemplar project in how architecture can be central to successful curatorial development”. It got over a million visitors in its first year alone.

Affiliations

I’ve been a research associate at the Science Museum since 2018. I’m a Council Member of the Antiquarian Horological Society and a Liveryman and Past Steward of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, founded 1631. I formerly sat on the management committee of the Clockmakers’ Museum, the oldest clock and watch museum in the world. From 2016 to 2022, I was a research associate at Royal Holloway’s geography department, where I’d previously studied for a doctorate on the political history of traffic. I’m a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and I live in London.