How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

  The need for split-second accuracy would emerge not from the calendar but from the map. This was the first great age of global navigation, after all. Inspired by Columbus, ships were sailing to the Far East and the newly discovered Americas, with vast fortunes awaiting those who navigated the oceans successfully. (And almost certain death awaiting those who got lost.) But sailors lacked any way to determine longitude at sea. Latitude you could gauge just by looking up at the sky. But before modern navigation technology, the only way to figure out a ship’s longitude involved two clocks. One clock was set to the exact time of your origin point (assuming you knew the longitude of that location). The other clock recorded the current time at your location at sea. The difference between the two times told you your longitudinal position: every four minutes of difference translated to one degree of longitude, or sixty-eight miles at the equator.

  Galileo Galilei

  In clear weather, you could easily reset the ship clock through accurate readings of the sun’s position. The problem was the home-port clock. With timekeeping technology losing or gaining up to twenty minutes a day, it was practically useless on day two of the journey. All across Europe, bounties were offered for anyone who could solve the problem of determining longitude at sea: Philip III of Spain offered a life pension in ducats, while the famous Longitude Prize in England promised more than a million dollars in today’s currency. The urgency of the problem—and the economic rewards for solving it—brought Galileo’s mind back to the pursuit of “equal time” that had first captured his imagination at the age of nineteen. His astronomical observations had suggested that the regular eclipses of Jupiter’s moons might be useful for navigators keeping time at sea, but the method he devised was too complicated (and not as accurate as he had hoped). And so he returned, one last time, to the pendulum.

  Fifty-eight years in the making, his slow hunch about the pendulum’s “magical property” had finally begun to take shape. The idea lay at the intersection point of multiple disciplines and interests: Galileo’s memory of the altar lamp, his studies of motion and the moons of Jupiter, the rise of a global shipping industry, and its new demand for clocks that would be accurate to the second. Physics, astronomy, maritime navigation, and the daydreams of a college student: all these different strains converged in Galileo’s mind. Aided by his son, he began drawing up plans for the first pendulum clock.

  By the end of the next century, the pendulum clock had become a regular sight throughout Europe, particularly in England—in workplaces, town squares, even well-to-do homes. The British historian E. P. Thompson, in a brilliant essay on time and industrialization published in the late 1960s, noted that in the literature of the period, one of the telltale signs that a character has raised himself a rung or two up the socioeconomic ladder is the acquisition of a pocket watch. But these new timepieces were not just fashion accessories. A hundred times more accurate than its predecessors—losing or gaining only a minute or so a week—the pendulum clock brought about a change in the perception of time that we still live with today.

  Drawing of the pendulum clock designed by Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher Galileo Galilei, 1638–1659.

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  WHEN WE THINK ABOUT the technology that created the industrial revolution, we naturally conjure up the thunderous steam engines and steam-powered looms. But beneath the cacophony of the mills, a softer but equally important sound was everywhere: the ticking of pendulum clocks, quietly keeping time.

  Imagine some alternative history where, for whatever reason, timekeeping technology lags behind the development of the other machines that catalyzed the industrial age. Would the industrial revolution have even happened? You can make a reasonably good case that the answer is no. Without clocks, the industrial takeoff that began in England in the middle of the eighteenth century would, at the very least, have taken much longer to reach escape velocity—for several reasons. Accurate clocks, thanks to their unrivaled ability to determine longitude at sea, greatly reduced the risks of global shipping networks, which gave the first industrialists a constant supply of raw materials and access to overseas markets. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, the most reliable watches in the world were manufactured in England, which created a pool of expertise with fine-tool manufacture that would prove to be incredibly handy when the demands of industrial innovation arrived, just as the glassmaking expertise producing spectacles opened the door for telescopes and microscopes. The watchmakers were the advance guard of what would become industrial engineering.

  Marine chronometer, from the Clockmakers’ Museum at the city’s Guildhall, London

  More than anything else, though, industrial life needed clock time to regulate the new working day. In older agrarian or feudal economies, units of time were likely to be described in terms of the time required to complete a task. The day was divided not into abstract, mathematical units, but into a series of activities: instead of fifteen minutes, time was described as how long it would take to milk the cow or nail soles to a new pair of shoes. Instead of being paid by the hour, craftsmen were conventionally paid by the piece produced—what was commonly called “taken-work”—and their daily schedules were almost comically unregulated. Thompson cites the diary of one farming weaver from 1782 or 1783 as an example of scattered routines of pre-industrial work:

  On a rainy day, he might weave 8½ yards; on October 14th he carried his finished piece, and so wove only 4¾ yards; on the 23rd he worked out till 3 o’clock, wove two yards before the sun set… . Apart from harvesting and threshing, churning, ditching and gardening, we have these entries: “Wove 2½ yards the Cow having calved she required much attendance.” On January 25th he wove 2 yards, walked to a nearby village, and did “sundry jobbs [sic] about the lathe and in the yard and wrote a letter in the evening.” Other occupations include jobbing with a horse and cart, picking cherries, working on a mill dam, attending a Baptist association, and a public hanging.

  Try showing up for work in a modern office on that kind of clock. (Not even famously laid-back Google could tolerate that level of eccentricity.) For an industrialist trying to synchronize the actions of hundreds of workers with the mechanical tempo of the first factories, this kind of desultory work life was unmanageable. And so the creation of a viable industrial workforce required a profound reshaping of the human perception of time. The pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood, whose Birmingham mills mark the very beginnings of industrial England, first implemented the convention of “clocking in” to work each day. (The lovely double entendre of “punching the clock” would have been meaningless to anyone born before 1700.) The whole idea of an “hourly wage”—now practically universal in the modern world—came out of the time regimen of the industrial age. In such a system, Thompson writes, “the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted… . Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.”

  For the first generations living through this transformation, the invention of “time discipline” was deeply disorienting. Today, most of us in the developed world—and increasingly in the developing world—have been acclimated to the strict regimen of clock time from an early age. (Sit in on your average kindergarten classroom and you’ll see the extensive focus on explaining and reinforcing the day’s schedule.) The natural rhythms of tasks and leisure had to be forcibly replaced with an abstract grid. When you spend your whole life inside that grid, it seems like second nature, but when you are experiencing it for the first time, as the laborers of industrial England did in the second half of the eighteenth century, it arrives as a shock to the system. Timepieces were not just tools to help you coordinate the day’s events, but something more ominous: the “deadly statistical clock,” in Dickens’s Hard Times, “which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin lid.”

  Workers punching the time clock at the Rouge Plant of the Ford Motor Company.

  Naturally, that new regimen provoked a backlash. Not so much from the wo
rking classes—who began operating within the dictates of clock time by demanding overtime wages or shorter workdays—but rather from the aesthetes. To be a Romantic at the turn of the nineteenth century was in part to break from the growing tyranny of clock time: to sleep late, ramble aimlessly through the city, refuse to live by the “statistical clocks” that governed economic life. In The Prelude, Wordsworth announces his break from the “keepers of our time”:

  The guides, the wardens of our faculties

  And stewards of our labour, watchful men

  And skillful in the usury of time

  Sages, who in their prescience would control

  all accidents, and to the very road

  which they have fashioned would confine us down

  like engines …

  The time discipline of the pendulum clock took the informal flow of experience and nailed it to a mathematical grid. If time is a river, the pendulum clock turned it into a canal of evenly spaced locks, engineered for the rhythms of industry. Once again, an increase in our ability to measure things turned out to be as important as our ability to make them.

  Potrait of Aaron Lufkin Dennison

  That power to measure time was not distributed evenly through society: pocket watches remained luxury items until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a Massachusetts cobbler’s son named Aaron Dennison borrowed the new process of manufacturing armaments using standardized, interchangeable parts and applied the same techniques to watchmaking. At the time, the production of advanced watches involved more than a hundred distinct jobs: one person would make individual flea-sized screws, by turning a piece of steel on a thread; another would inscribe watch cases; and so on. Dennison had a vision of machines mass-producing identical tiny screws that could then be put into any watch of the same model, and machines that would engrave cases at precision speed. His vision took him through a bankruptcy or two, and earned him the nickname “the Lunatic of Boston” in the local press. But eventually, in the early 1860s, he hit on the idea of making a cheaper watch, without the conventional jeweled ornamentation that traditionally adorned pocket watches. It would be the first watch targeted at the mass market, not just the well-to-do.

  Dennison’s “Wm. Ellery” watch—named after one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, William Ellery—became a breakout hit, particularly with the soldiers of the Civil War. More than 160,000 watches were sold; even Abraham Lincoln owned and carried a “Wm. Ellery” watch. Dennison turned a luxury item into a must-have commodity. In 1850, the average pocket watch cost $40; by 1878, a Dennison unjeweled watch cost just $3.50.

  With watches spiking in popularity across the country, a Minnesota railroad agent named Richard Warren Sears stumbled across a box of unwanted watches from a local jeweler, and turned a tidy profit selling them to other station agents. Inspired by his success, he partnered with a Chicago businessman named Alvah Roebuck, and together they launched a mail-order publication showcasing a range of watch designs: the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Those fifteen pounds of mail-order catalogs currently weighing down your mailbox? They all started with the must-have gadget of the late nineteenth century: the consumer-grade pocket watch.

  Unknown soldier with pocket watch, 1860s (Library of Congress)

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  WHEN DENNISON FIRST STARTED thinking about democratizing time in America, in one key respect the clocks of the period remained woefully irregular. Local time—in cities and towns across the United States—was now accurate to the second, if you consulted a public clock in a place where time discipline was particularly crucial. But there were literally thousands of distinct local times. Clock time had been democratized, but it had not yet been standardized. Thanks to Dennison, watches were spreading quickly through the system, but they were all running at different times. In the United States, each town and village ran at its own independent pace—with clocks synced to the sun’s position in the sky. As you moved west or east, even a few miles, the shifting relationship to the sun would produce a different time on a sundial. You could be standing in one city at 6:00 p.m., but just three towns over, the correct time would be 6:05. If you asked what time it was 150 years ago, you would have received at least twenty-three different answers in the state of Indiana, twenty-seven in Michigan, and thirty-eight in Wisconsin.

  The strangest thing about this irregularity is the fact that no one noticed it. You couldn’t talk directly to someone three towns over, and it took an hour or two to get there by unreliable roads at low speeds. So a few minutes of fuzziness in the respective clocks of each town didn’t even register. But once people (and information) began to travel faster, the lack of standardization suddenly became a massive problem. Telegraphs and railroads exposed the hidden blurriness of nonstandardized clock time, just as, centuries before, the invention of the book had exposed the need for spectacles among the first generation of European readers.

  The rewinding of a big Dennison watch (operation done once a year) in the district of Holborn, London.

  Trains moving east or west—longitudinally—travel faster than the sun moves through the sky. So for every hour you traveled on a train, you needed to adjust your watch by four minutes. In addition, each railroad was running on its own clock, which meant that making a journey in the nineteenth century took some formidable number crunching. You’d leave New York at 8:00 a.m. New York time, catching the 8:05 on Columbia Railroad time, and arrive in Baltimore three hours later later, at 10:54 Baltimore time, which was, technically speaking, 11:05 Columbia Rail time, where you would wait ten minutes and then catch the 11:01 B&O train to Wheeling, West Virgina, which was, technically speaking again, the 10:49 train if you were on Wheeling time, and 11:10 if your watch was still keeping New York time. And the funny thing is, all those different times were the right ones, at least measured by the sun’s position in the sky. What made time easily measured by sundial made it infuriating by railroad.

  The British had dealt with this problem by standardizing the entire country on Greenwich Mean Time in the late 1840s, synchronizing railroad clocks by telegraph. (To this day, clocks in every air traffic control center and cockpit around the world report Greenwich time; GMT is the single time zone of the sky.) But the United States was too sprawling to run off of one clock, particularly after the transcontinental railroad opened in 1869. With eight thousand towns across the country, each on its own clock, and over a hundred thousand miles of railroad track connecting them, the need for some kind of standardized system became overwhelming. For several decades, various proposals circulated for standardizing U.S. time, but nothing solidified. The logistical hurdles of coordinating schedules and clocks were immense, and somehow standardized time seemed to spark a strange feeling of resentment among ordinary citizens, as though it were an act against nature itself. A Cincinnati paper editorialized against standard time: “It is simply preposterous… . Let the people of Cincinnati stick to the truth as it is written by the sun, moon and stars.”

  The United States remained temporally challenged until the early 1880s, when a railroad engineer named William F. Allen took on the cause. As the editor of a guide to railroad timetables, Allen knew firsthand how Byzantine the existing time system was. At a railroad convention in St. Louis in 1883, Allen presented a map that proposed a shift from fifty distinct railroad times to the four time zones that are still in use, more than a century later: Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific. Allen designed the map so that the divisions between time zones zigzagged slightly to correspond to the points where the major railroad lines connected, instead of having the divisions run straight down meridian lines.

  Persuaded by Allen’s plan, the railroad bosses gave him just nine months to make his idea a reality. He launched an energetic campaign of letter-writing and arm-twisting to convince observatories and city councils. It was an extraordinarily challenging campaign, but somehow Allen managed to pull it off. On November 18, 1883, the United States experienced one of the strangest days in the history of
clock time, what became known as “the day of two noons.” Eastern Standard Time, as Allen had defined it, ran exactly four minutes behind local New York time. On that November day, the Manhattan church bells rang out the old New York noon, and then four minutes later, a second noon was announced by a second ringing: the very first 12:00 p.m., EST. The second noon was broadcast out across the country via telegraph, allowing railroad lines and town squares all the way to the Pacific to synchronize their clocks.

  The very next year, GMT was set as the international clock (based on Greenwich being located on the prime meridian), and the whole globe was divided into time zones. The world had begun to break free from the celestial rhythms of the solar system. Consulting the sun was no longer the most accurate way to tell the time. Instead, pulses of electricity traveling by telegraph wire from distant cities kept our clocks in sync.

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  ONE OF THE STRANGE PROPERTIES of the measurement of time is that it doesn’t belong neatly to a single scientific discipline. In fact, each leap forward in our ability to measure time has involved a handoff from one discipline to another. The shift from sundials to pendulum clocks relied on a shift from astronomy to dynamics, the physics of motion. The next revolution in time would depend on electromechanics. With each revolution, though, the general pattern remained the same: scientists discover some natural phenomenon that displays the propensity for keeping “equal time” that Galileo had observed in the altar lamps, and before long a wave of inventors and engineers begin using that new tempo to synchronize their devices. In the 1880s, Pierre and Jacques Curie first detected a curious property of certain crystals, including quartz, the very same material that had been so revolutionary for the glassmakers of Murano: under pressure, these crystals could be made to vibrate at a remarkably stable frequency. (This property came to be known as “piezoelectricity.”) The effect was even more pronounced when an alternating current was applied to the crystal.