Random Thoughts

[Angrboda]

Perhaps the best-known thing about Kant as a person is that he was so regular in his habits that the people of Königsberg set their watches by his evening walk. Like many emblematic stories about famous people, this turns out to be not quite true. It was actually Kant’s good friend Joseph Green, an English merchant, who was fanatically punctual; a Königsberg wit wrote a satirical play, “The Man of the Clock,” that is thought to be based on him. Kant’s biographer Manfred Kuehn writes that “the neighbors could set their clocks in accordance with the time at which Kant left Green’s house in the evening” because Green had an ironclad rule: “at seven o’clock the visit was over.”

Ibid.