“Charles Piazzi Smyth: The Man Who Was Proven Right” (200th anniv of his birth) ​- Amongst other achievements credited to 2nd Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1901), are two innovations: on one hand significant improvements of a distributed time service in the city Edinburgh, and on the other hand advancement of empirical Astronomy through setting up mountaintop observatories. But it was not all plain stargazing – in this talk by Matjaz Vidmar from the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, we examine the persistent critical tension between the astronomer’s work on their “civic” and “academic” duties and the reason why it took nearly 100 years before Charles Piazzi Smyth’s idea of mountaintop observatories took off.