The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918

With a New Preface

Stephen Kern

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780674744370
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Moderne Geschichte

Stephen Kern writes about the sweeping changes in technology and culture between 1880 and World War I that created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. To mark the book's twentieth anniversary, Kern provides an illuminating new preface about the breakthrough in interpretive approach that has made this a seminal work in interdisciplinary studies.

1

THE NATURE OF TIME

In the preface to a collection of essays on the history of ideas, the cultural historian Arthur O. Lovejoy complained that many studies overunified the views of an author in order to present his thinking “all-of-a-piece.” In his own essays he sought to correct that weakness and present the “inner tensions—the fluctuations or hesitancies between opposing ideas or moods, or the simple and more or less unconscious embracing of both sides of an antithesis.”¹ Lovejoy was referring to an individual’s thinking, but the warning applies even more to the thought of an age. The great variety of views in any particular age do not all line up on one side of the issues. I present the critical concepts dramaturgically in accord with the theory that knowledge is essentially dialectical, that ideas are generated in opposition to other ideas and have a basic polemical nature. The development of a body of thought involves a selection from, and an occasional resolution of, contrasting views. The ideas of this period on the nature of time will be organized around three pairs of opposing views: whether time was homogeneous or heterogeneous, atomistic or a flux, reversible or irreversible.

As every child quickly learns, there is only one time. It flows uniformly and may be divided into equal parts anywhere along the line. This is the time Isaac Newton defined in 1687: “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external.” In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Immanuel Kant rejected the Newtonian theory of absolute, objective time (because it could not possibly be experienced) and maintained that time was a subjective form or foundation of all experience. But even though it was subjective, it was also universal—the same for everybody. No doubt Newton and Kant experienced different paces of private time, but before the late nineteenth century no one (with the possible exception of Laurence Sterne, who explored private time in Tristram Shandy) systematically questioned the homogeneity of time. The evidence for it was written on the faces of the millions of clocks and watches manufactured every year.

The most momentous development in the history of uniform, public time since the invention of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth century was the introduction of standard time at the end of the nineteenth century. A pioneer in promoting uniform time was the Canadian engineer Sanford Fleming, who in 1886 outlined some reasons for its adoption. The use of the telegraph “subjects the whole surface of the globe to the observation of civilized communities and leaves no interval of time between widely separated places proportionate to their distances apart.” This system mixes up day and night as “noon, midnight, sunrise, sunset, are all observed at the same moment,” and “Sunday actually commences in the middle of Saturday and lasts until the middle of Monday.”² A single event may take place in two different months or even in two different years. It was important to be able to determine local times and to know precisely when laws go into effect and insurance policies begin. The present system, he concluded, would lead to countless political, economic, scientific, and legal problems that only the adoption of a coordinated world network could prevent.

The most famous supporter of standard time, Count Helmuth von Moltke, in 1891 appealed to the German Parliament for its adoption. He pointed out that Germany had five different time zones, which would impede the coordination of military planning; in addition there were other time zones, he protested, that “we dread to meet at the French and Russian boundaries.”³ When Fleming sent Moltke’s speech to the editor of The Empire for publication, he did not dream that in 1914 the world would go to war according to mobilization timetables facilitated by standard time, which he thought would rather engender cooperation and peace.

Despite all the good scientific and military arguments for world time, it was the railroad companies and not the governments that were the first to institute it. Around 1870, if a traveler from Washington to San Francisco set his watch in every town he passed through, he would set it over two hundred times. The railroads attempted to deal with this problem by using a separate time for each region. Thus cities along the Pennsylvania Railroad were put on Philadelphia time, which ran five minutes behind New York time. However, in 1870 there were still about 80 different railroad times in the United States alone.⁴ The day the railroads imposed a uniform time, November 18, 1883, was called “the day of two noons,” because at mid-day clocks had to be set back in the eastern part of each zone—one last necessary disruption to enable the railroads to end the confusion that had so complicated their functioning and cut into their profits. In 1884 representatives of twenty-five countries that convened at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington proposed to establish Greenwich as the zero meridian, determined the exact length of the day, divided the earth into twenty-four time zones one hour apart, and fixed a precise beginning of the universal day. But the world was slow to adopt the system, for all its obvious practicality.

Japan coordinated railroads and telegraphic services nine hours ahead of Greenwich in 1888. Belgium and Holland followed in 1892; Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy in 1893; but in 1899, when John Milne surveyed how countries throughout the world determined their time and its relation to Greenwich, there was still a great deal of confusion. Telegraph companies in China used a time that was approximately the same as in Shanghai; foreigners in coastal ports used their own local time taken from solar readings; and all other Chinese used sundials. In Russia there were odd local times such as that of St. Petersburg—two hours, one minute, and 18.7 seconds ahead of Greenwich. In India hundreds of local times were announced in towns by gongs, guns, and bells.⁵

Among the countries in Western Europe, France had the most chaotic situation, with some regions having four different times, none of which had a simple conversion to Greenwich time. Each city had a local time taken from solar readings. About four minutes behind each local time was astronomical time taken from fixed stars. The railroads used Paris time, which was nine minutes and twenty-one seconds ahead of Greenwich. A law of 1891 made it the legal time of France, but the railroads actually ran five minutes behind it in order to give passengers extra time to board: thus the clocks inside railway stations were five minutes ahead of those on the tracks.⁶ In 1913 a French journalist, L. Houllevigue, explained this “retrograde practice” as a function of a national pride, expressed in the wording of a law of 1911 promoting the system that other countries of Europe had adopted twenty years earlier. The French law declared that “the legal time in France and Algeria is the mean Paris time slowed nine minutes and twenty-one seconds.” Houllevigue pointed out the Anglophobic intent of the wording: “By a pardonable reticence, the law abstained from saying that the time so defined is that of Greenwich, and our self-respect can pretend that we have adopted the time of Argentan, which happens to lie almost exactly on the same meridian as the English observatory.”⁷ In spite of their previous isolation the French finally took the lead in the movement for unified world time based on the guidelines of 1884. If the zero meridian was to be on English soil, at least the institution of world time would take place in France. So President Raymond Poincaré had Paris host the International Conference on Time in 1912, which provided for a uniform method of determining and maintaining accurate time signals and transmitting them around the world.

The wireless telegraph made it all possible. As early as 1905 the United States Navy had sent time signals by wireless from Washington. The Eiffel Tower transmitted Paris time in 1910 even before it was legally declared the time of France. By 1912 the system was expanded with installations in Nancy, Charleville, and Langres so that the entire country could receive the same signals simultaneously. Houllevigue boasted that Paris, “supplanted by Greenwich as the origin of the meridians, was proclaimed the initial time center, the watch of the universe.”⁸ The observatory at Paris would take astronomical readings and send them to the Eiffel Tower, which would relay them to eight stations spaced over the globe. At 10 o’clock on the morning of July 1, 1913, the Eiffel Tower sent the first time signal transmitted around the world. The independence of local times began to collapse once the framework of a global electronic network was established. Whatever charm local time might have once had, the world was fated to wake up with buzzers and bells triggered by impulses that traveled around the world with the speed of light.

Around the time of the International Conference on Time various proposals for calendar reform were made. Nothing concrete came of them, but they reveal a parallel effort to rationalize public time. In 1912 an American reformer noted that while the year, month, and day have a basis in nature, the week and the hour are entirely artificial. The “stupid” arrangement of the calendar, he argued, should be simplified by dividing the year into four equal seasons of 91 days each and leaving out New Year’s day and one day every four years.⁹ In an introduction to a proposal of 1913 by Paul Delaporte for calendar reform, the French scientific writer Camille Flammarion applauded the achievements of the International Conference on Time, observed that the unequal divisions of the year should be modified, and endorsed Delaporte’s proposal to shorten every month to twenty-eight days, with an intercalary period added in the middle of the year so that workers could be paid every four weeks and rent would be due and interest computed for the same length of time every month. The year would always begin on the same day, thus obviating the reprinting of calendars.¹⁰ In 1914 an Englishman emphasized difficulties in scheduling for business and government and recommended a calendar in which each quarter would be composed of two thirty-day months and one thirty-one day month, with leap year not counted at all.¹¹ A German reformer proposed a “hundred-hour day” composed of units approximately equivalent to a quarter-hour. Just as the introduction of the decimal system in spatial measurements had enabled the German people to make rapid economic development, he contended, so might the introduction of a temporal decimal system liberate resources for other pursuits.¹²

A science-fiction novel of 1893 about life on Mars incorporated some of the developments in standard time made in the previous decade. In Henry Olerich’s A Cityless and Countryless World, every dwelling and working place was furnished with clocks that were astronomically regulated and electronically synchronized. The standard for money was time: “In business, when you say I want so many dollars, cents and mills for an article, we say I want so many days, hours, minutes and seconds for it.”¹³ Martian currency consisted of paper bills stamped with units of time. This time money was perhaps inspired by the introduction of time-recording machines for workers. The same year that Olerich’s book was published, an article in Scientific American described a machine, in service since 1890, that stamped an employee’s card with the time he entered and left.¹⁴ Though he was paid in dollars, the time-stamped tape determined the amount. Olerich had only to make the slightest alteration to create a utopian world where time is money.

Punctuality and the recording of work time did not originate in this period, but never before had the temporal precision been as exact or as pervasive as in the age of electricity.¹⁵ From the outset there were critics. Some pathological effects were noted in that catalog of medical alarmism, George Beard’s American Nervousness. He blamed the perfection of clocks and the invention of watches for causing nervousness wherein “a delay of a few moments might destroy the hopes of a lifetime.”¹⁶ Every glance at the watch for these nervous types affects the pulse and puts a strain on the nerves. There were many other alarmists who reacted adversely to the introduction of standard time, but the modern age embraced universal time and punctuality because these served its larger needs. That prerevolutionary, pastoral image in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, of Russian peasants coming to the railroad station at dawn to wait for a train that might not arrive until the late afternoon, suggested a life style more frustrating and wasteful than it was idyllic.

The proponents of world time were few, and none of them (aside from Moltke) were well known beyond the narrow circle of fellow reformers. Nevertheless the concept of public time was widely accepted as a proper marker of duration and succession. There were no elaborate arguments on its behalf because there seemed to be no need. The passion in the debate about homogeneous versus heterogeneous time was generated rather by those novelists, psychologists, physicists, and sociologists who examined the way individuals create as many different times as there are life styles, reference systems, and social forms.

Of all the assaults on the authority of uniform public time that appeared in the imaginative literature of this period, the most direct was the one assigned to the Russian anarchist in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). His task as an agent provocateur in England was to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. Conrad could not have picked a more appropriate anarchist objective, a more graphic symbol of centralized political authority.

The heterogeneity of private time and its conflict with public time was explored in a number of literary works. In 1890 Oscar Wilde imagined a sinister discordance between body time and public time for his Dorian Gray, whose portrait aged in his place while he stayed young. When Dorian stabs the portrait, the magic ends and the two times race back to their proper positions: the portrait changes back to innocent youth, and Dorian’s face registers the corruption that the portrait had concealed.

Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past takes place in a clearly identifiable public time from the Dreyfus affair to World War I. But the private time of its narrator, Marcel, moves at an irregular pace that is repeatedly out of phase with that of the other characters and defies reckoning by any standard system. Marcel reflected that his body kept its own time while he slept, “not on a dial superficially marked but by the steadily growing weight of all my replenished forces which, like a powerful clockwork, it had allowed, notch by notch, to descend from my brain into the rest of my body.”¹⁷ In the...