Time Lord (6 page)

All across the continent, every twelve miles-plus along the same east-west latitude—New York to San Francisco, let us say—as the sun crossed new longitudinal meridians, new noons were created, new time-balls were lowered, new bells went off. Out in the Delaware Valley, sixty miles west of New York City, it was just 11:55
A.M
. when the whistles were blowing in lower Manhattan. In fact, when the time-ball was falling in Manhattan, it was only 11:59
A.M
. in Newark, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River.

So long as people remained in their towns and villages, or on their farms, and so long as sailing boats, riverboats, barges and horses, or oxcarts provided the means of transport, competing time standards really didn’t matter. No one could go far enough or fast enough in a day, let alone in an hour, to run into confusion. Then, as now, people wanted the assurance of precision, but they were not in the habit of looking beyond their own horizon. As “magnetic” (electric) technology evolved during the nineteenth century, it became possible for telegraphy to provide exact time signals from the nearest observatory, directly to the time-ball. The first such “magnetically signaled” time-ball was
installed in Toronto in 1842. In 1868, at the Naval Observatory in Washington, the instant signal was coupled to an electric motor, which permitted the automatic dropping of a precisely accurate time-ball. Automatic signaling was an advance in convenience, but it did not address the basic problem. There were still too many different times. Had railroads and the telegraph—in other words,
speed
—not disrupted the system of local time notation, rendering the sun too slow a metronome, the temporal revolution might well have been delayed until the next revolution, the spreading electrical power grid, demanded it.

(Not to race too far ahead, but it is instructive, I think, to consider a temporal dilemma we will be facing in the near future. The Internet and its related technologies are establishing a new time consciousness even while we observe nineteenth-century railroad time as our official standard. The debates of the nineteenth century have shown us that society, and maybe even the human psyche, do not easily adapt to competing time standards. I doubt that the twenty-first century will be any more successful.)

ESSENTIALLY, ANY
official adherence to the solar noon involves two distinct and unavoidable flaws. One derives from the earth’s rotation, the other from its tilt. The rotation, as we’ve already seen, spawns countless noons, and therefore countless midnights. The circumference of the earth, twenty-four thousand miles, contains nearly two thousand solar minutes and a theoretical infinity of legal “solar days” based on the mad precision of the solar minute and the solar second. New York’s “day” started and ended five minutes before Philadelphia’s, a minute before Newark’s, twelve minutes after Boston’s … and so on. Ninth Avenue in New York is a fraction of a second “faster” than its westerly neighbor Tenth Avenue; they could each claim a separate day. Where does it end? If the Oakland Bay Bridge had been built in the nineteenth century, the Oakland end would have been thirty seconds “faster” than San Francisco’s. At least,
the earth’s rotation is steady and predictable, and if one is prepared to live with the infuriating multiplicity it demands, it is calculable.

The earth’s tilt, however, introduces a wild card. Unless one lives on the equator, each day’s noon falls a few seconds or minutes earlier or later than the noon of the previous day. The sun rises or sets at a different minute each day. (The more northerly position of Europe exacerbates the daily differences even more dramatically.) In a world run on natural rhythms, regulated by priests or other appointed or hereditary interpreters, solar irregularities are merely the visible face of God. Sunrise (for Hindus) and sunset (for Jews and Muslims), rather than the West’s civil midnight, whenever they occur, mark the beginning of the natural or religious day. Only in a world of contracts, wages, and schedules are natural variables taken as irritants. At whose midnight, for example—yours or the company headquarters’—might an insurance policy run out, or a new law take effect? A birth or a death occurring near midnight on the last day of a month, or year, might officially occur (that is, be entered on a registry) on a different day, month, or year wherever such records were kept, a few miles east or west of the original event.

Versions of the sundial method of time-reckoning had served the Greeks, the Romans, the Jews, the Arabs, and doubtless the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Chinese, and the Druids—at least on cloudless days—but their methods, however ingenious, could not satisfy the needs for both precision
and
predictability that technologically sophisticated Europeans and Americans came to demand. In other words, nature’s time is fine for religious observation, but it’s a rotten way to run a railroad. And running the railroad, as the rail systems expanded and nineteenth-century commerce grew increasingly dependent upon them, is what standard time was all about.

The true problem with ancient methods of timekeeping was not only the inevitable meteorological and seasonal complications,
but the fact that a multiplicity of so-called local times meant that none of them could be readily converted. Town A could not know the times in Towns B, C, and D, but this inability had not been a problem until rapid travel between settlements became common, practical, and comfortable. Solar time converts nothing; it cannot function as a gauge. Having too many times, the traveling public was discovering, was worse than having no time at all. Official times multiplied like weeds, and nature offered only a nightmare of endless proliferation. At mid-century, there were 144 official times in North America. And no one, apparently, was there to rationalize it.

S
ANDFORD
F
LEMING
, in an 1890 essay, “Our Old-Fogy Methods of Reckoning Time,” a retrospective history of the standard-time movement and the struggle for its acceptance, would have taken strong exception to a term I’ve been using rather loosely—“local time.” He found the very idea objectionable, in that it encouraged the common misconception that there were, indeed, many times. When I use that convenient but imprecise phrase, please be mindful of the following caveat:

That warning, six years after the Prime Meridian Conference that had settled standard time for the world, is a fair introduction to Fleming’s engineering mind. Time was a unity with many facets (at least twenty-four), and he strenuously opposed the notion that any one claimant, even Greenwich, possessed a special time. It is the reason he fought stubbornly for the adoption of a “universal day” (sometimes called “cosmic” or “terrestrial”), free of any geographical determinant, free also of the familiar twenty-four time zones.

Those comments sum up the difference between Fleming and the American pioneers of standard time. He worked on a universal scale, they on a national. The next time I use the words “local
time,” please supply them with quotation marks, preceded by “so-called,” courtesy of Sandford Fleming.

IN THE LATE
1840s, Henry David Thoreau sought refuge from the quiet desperation of town life and society by withdrawing to Walden Pond.
Walden
, like many classic texts, including the concluding “The Dynamo and the Virgin” chapter in Henry Adams’s
Education
, can be interpreted by a willful reader as a reflection on temporality as well as society, particularly on the changing time standards that were (even then) in the air. Armies of workers were beginning to be regulated by time, the mechanical clock. “Actually,” he wrote, “the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.”

He has no time:
surely a new and disturbing development. Leo Marx, Thoreau’s great exegete, states in
The Machine in the Garden
that the function of the clock is decisive in Thoreau’s version of capitalism “because it links the industrial apparatus with consciousness. The laboring man becomes a machine in the sense that his life becomes more closely geared to an impersonal and seemingly autonomous system.” Certainly that is true, but there is another focus. Thoreau was alert to frightful new creatures that lurked in the temporal wilderness of mid-century Western culture. Men without time, without integrity. Machine men, emasculated men. He sought solace, like his English Romantic forebears, in the great and permanent forms of nature, in classic texts and Eastern religions. He was caught between the rapid spread of the railroad, which was refashioning the world in its own image, and society’s helplessness before it. The railroad knew no temporal boundaries; men must bow before its demands. Thoreau’s anxiety stemmed at least in part from industry’s assault on what we’d call the time-space continuum. Time was in the air.

It was the railroad that filled the night with the creak and rumble
of traffic, that brought the timbering and ice-harvesting crews, that filled the winter sky with clouds of black smoke. No wonder he remarked, “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.”
Walden
was an assertion of individuality resisting industrialization, an American version (and near-total inversion) of Marx and Engels’s chain-rattling
Communist Manifesto
, not so coincidentally researched in the same year. In that universally revolutionary year of 1848, while France imploded, Britain prospered. She became the first country in the world to standardize time across her entire territory to the time signal of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. (Irish time was set twenty minutes slower.) That year also saw the publication of
Dombey and Son
, Dickens’s almost literal demonstration of a railway’s riding upon the back of a distraught, psychologically ruined Mr. Dombey, in which he noted, “There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in.” Dickens, however, saw the train’s power and brute human achievement as potentially restorative, at least to those susceptible to its message, like Mr. Dombey.

Time, then, was beginning its long association with business and industry, with schedules, with commercial entombment, with depression and anxiety. When I think of time’s draining of personality, the enduring enigma of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) comes to mind, the eponym a ghostly presence in a Wall Street legal office. A character of compelling and enduring mystery, Bartleby is an emblematic wraith of negativity, an anomaly caught between temporal standards, as though waiting to die, or to be born. Present in body, absent in soul, very much the representation of Thoreau’s worker without the “leisure for integrity,” or the “manliest relations to men.”

“
EVEN THE EARLIEST
settlers knew about clocks and watches,” writes the American historian Michael O’Malley in
Keeping Watch: A History of American Time
, “but they understood
mechanical timepieces as mere representations or symbols of time, not as the embodiment of time itself.” In the middle of the nineteenth century the nature of time was beginning to change. It was no longer the God-given moral accountant of human folly (as in the parable of the ant and grasshopper: “It’s seven o’clock, have you done your chores?”), but a new player in the sober world of commerce, punctuality, and reliability (“Oh, God, I’ve got ten minutes to get to work!”). It’s an important distinction: Is time allotted by God for our moral uplift, or do we take it (or save it) for our economic and personal betterment?

There is another way in which Emerson’s essays, Thoreau’s
Walden
, Hawthorne’s journals, or Melville’s tales are affecting elegies for a passing America. The worldly seafaring tradition of New England had fed Thoreau’s imagination in his months of self-exile. During his year at Walden Pond, Thoreau, an intellectual mariner, was never cut off from Western, even universal, culture. He read the Hindu devotional, Bhagavad Gita, he considered Greek and Latin classics, he imagined (if only to dismiss) voyages to every part of the wider world. The globe and all of history were (almost literally) at his back, and they were, to put it simply, his comforters, his friends. The true terror was the prospects opened up by the railroad, already launching its great westward journey into the darkness of unsettled territories, and in the process draining New England of its traditional leadership role. Portland, Maine, in the 1850s and sixties was larger than either of the emerging metropolises of Atlanta or Houston. For the first time in history, having the sea instead of empty spaces at one’s back was an economic deterrent—or at least a less certain guarantor of future growth. The railroads were spreading and the oceans were their only barriers. Abundant, inexpensive, fertile, unpopulated land became more predictive of future success than a safe harbor, orderly villages, settled societies, noble history, books, and intellectual graces.