Decorated initial D

uring the 1860s and 1870s, coordinated time reached deeper into the cities and train system. Hailed in the press, visible in the streets, studied in observatories and laboratories, the synchronized clock was anything but rarified science. Its capillary extension into train stations, neighborhoods, and churches meant that synchronized time intervened in peoples’ lives the way electric power, sewage, or gas did: as a circulating fluid of modern urban life. Unlike other public services, time synchronization depended directly on scientists. By the end of the 1870s, the Harvard College Observatory was but one site sending time, though for a few years its service was one of the largest. Idiosyncratic developments in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Greenwich, Paris, or Berlin set each apart.

Partly pushing the observatories, partly pushed by them, train supervisors, telegraph operators, and watchmakers accelerated the electrical coordination of clocks both in England and in the United States. By 1852, directed by the Astronomer Royal, British clocks were sending electrical signals over telegraph lines both to public clocks and to railways. Soon the Americans were, too. Summing up the status of their time effort, the director of the Harvard College Observatory boasted in late 1853 that the “beats of our clock can, in effect, be instantly made audible at any telegraph station within several hundred miles of this Observatory.” During the 1860s and 1870s, coordinated time reached deeper into the cities and train system. Hailed in the press, visible in the streets, studied in observatories and laboratories, the synchronized clock was anything but rarified science. Its capillary extension into train stations, neighborhoods, and churches meant that synchronized time intervened in peoples’ lives the way electric power, sewage, or gas did: as a circulating fluid of modern urban life. Unlike other public services, time synchronization depended directly on scientists. [107-08]

Both astronomers and railroaders viewed the new technologies of transport and communication as disciplining time more effectively than any school. As [William F.] Allen put it, “Railroad trains are the great educators and monitors of the people in teaching and maintaining exact time.” Train lines had altered the experience of time across Europe and North America; more than that, for an ever-growing portion of the population, railroad schedules had come to define time, to instantiate synchronicity. Indeed, without the quintessentially modern trains and telegraphs, the temporal structure of the world would, for most people, drift from its moorings. “I venture to assert,” Allen added, “that if this city were cut off from railroad and telegraph communication for an entire month, and on the first night all clocks and watches were simultaneously and surreptitiously set half an hour faster or slower, not one person out of a thousand would ... discover for himself that any change had been made.” [125]

Bibliography

Galison. Peter. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: W. W. Norton: 2003.


Last modified 11 July 2017