by Philipp Blom
The ideas of Ford and Taylor were not widely implemented in pre-1914 Europe, but they were hotly discussed, and ‘Taylorism’ became a shorthand for efficiency among the bosses, and for the mechanized exploitation of workers among trade unionists, who put up determined resistance against all ‘Taylorist’ initiatives. Still, far-sighted Europeans were immensely attracted by the American approach to work, to life, and to the present. ‘History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today,’ Henry Ford had exclaimed. Faced with the hidebound societies and practices of Europe, some of the Continent’s most innovative minds - among them the car manufacturer Louis Renault, the later Austro-Hungarian steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein, and the architect Adolf Loos - travelled to the United States to observe the workings of a society untrammelled by tradition. They returned with the conviction that Europe must be streamlined, dusted, and thoroughly sped up.
Speed had become a physical experience. Four times faster than a pedestrian, the bicycle propelled its rider out of the confinement of his own life and into the countryside, away from the drawing rooms and towards a life free from social convention. Moralists were scandalized by the effect these anarchic vehicles would have on public morals, most especially on women, who pedalled along gleefully, having discarded their corsets and put on more practical clothing, including trousers. Meanwhile scientists gravely warned that the sheer rush, as well as their position - boldly astride the saddle - would stimulate women beyond endurance and reduce them to infertility, hysteria or worse, wanton creatures without any restraint.
The novelist Maurice Leblanc (creator of the famous gentleman thief Arsène Lupin) made entertaining use of this public fear in his 1898 novel Voici les ailes! (Here Are the Wings!) in which he described a cycle tour by two young couples. On the first day, one of the men remarks that nothing evokes speed more strongly than the hum of the wheels on the road, and the riders’ senses become more acute, allowing them a new experience of landscape. Meanwhile, the women begin to unbutton their blouses. Day two sees the women without their corsets, and on day three they remove their blouses altogether, riding through the countryside as modern-day Amazons. Finally, the two couples discard all convention in an orgy of free love.
The nexus between velocity and sexual excess was reinforced by Alfred Jarry’s novel Le surmâle (The Superman, published 1902), in which the cyclist hero first wins a 10,000-mile race against a steam train and then throws himself into paroxysmal love-making (‘This is not a man, but a machine,’ another character comments) which leaves him dead, exploded by his own energy and expired from lust. On a provincial railway track in New York State, far away from the lofty realms of avant-garde literature, the dream of man outracing a train had already become a reality. In 1899 the racing cyclist Charlie Murphy rode a mile in under a minute in the wind shadow of a train engine, gaining on it as he did so. Murphy almost died from exhaustion in the attempt and was badly burned by flying debris from the speeding locomotive, but for a few seconds, sheer human muscle power had propelled him faster than a steam train.
Technology and speed created a new kind of artificially enhanced superman, the precursor to the bionic heroes of our own day. In La Locomotion à travers le temps, les moeurs et l’espace (Locomotion Through Time, Customs and Space) Octave Uzanne rhapsodized about the ‘fever of speed’ in 1912: ‘The citizen is a mole with his undergrounds; he is an antelope, a thunder-bolt, cannon ball with his automobiles; he is an eagle, sparrow, albatross with his airplanes.’ In the journal Je sais tout, an anonymous author calculated in 1905 how much ‘taller’ people had grown through technological enhancement. He calculated the ‘effective physical size’ of a traveller by comparing how quickly a cyclist could cover a set distance, as compared to a pedestrian. His assessment showed how tall the pedestrian would have to be to walk at the cyclist’s pace: the hypothetical pedestrian would have to be fifteen metres tall. Comparisons with other forms of transportation showed that in a fast train, a voyager would be effectively 51 metres tall, while the chauffeur of a racing car would almost dwarf Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Technology had created a new race of giants - in both senses of the term - and it changed the experience of space and time itself. Greater speed made distances shrink and travel seem trivial. While space shrank, however, time expanded dramatically, making smaller and smaller intervals matter more, from Taylor and his system to newspapers printing events from around the world, complete with photos of scenes which had occurred just hours earlier, and sportsmen winning or losing by tenths of seconds.
At the Races
Every weekend, hundreds of thousands of people sought the exhilaration of speed by going to the races. Formerly this had been the domain of thoroughbreds and of high society, but the new bicycle and car races brought the thrill of fast machines to a mass audience. The indoor racing stadium the Vel d’hiv (Vélodrome d’hiver) in Paris opened in 1900, the Tour de France was first held in 1903 and the Berlin Sportpalast was inaugurated in 1906. Car races and rallies were already well established and newspapers were full of breathless reports about those magnificent men in their flying (or racing) machines.
Recording sporting achievements relied on another piece of technology that was now asserting its universal grip on humanity: whereas previously only the rich could afford watches, industrial manufacturing and the needs of an increasingly sophisticated economy now brought pocket watches to the masses. The historian Karl Lamprecht has estimated that some 12 million pocket watches were imported into Germany alone around the turn of the century. The first stopwatches with hands showing tenths of seconds came on the market in 1900. Sporting records, which had until then been matters of anecdote and estimate, now received the dignity of being documented fact.
The race was on. The mind of modern man, the French writer Octave Mirbeau thought, was an endless racetrack: ‘His thoughts, feelings, and loves are a whirlwind. Everywhere life is rushing insanely like a cavalry charge, and it vanishes cinematographically like trees and silhouettes along a road. Everything around man jumps, dances, gallops in a movement out of phase with his own.’ Marcel Proust was fascinated by cars and even decided to spend 27,000 francs on an aeroplane for his chauffeur and current idol Alfred Agostinelli, who fancied becoming a pilot. Before Proust could complete his purchase his young friend crashed into the Mediterranean and drowned. Proust was distraught at his loss.
Not only writers enthused about technological playthings. While there were some 3,000 automobiles in France around the turn of the century, the number had risen to 100,000 by 1914, and an automobile exhibition in Paris attracted 500,000 visitors in 1903. Other, less industrialized areas meanwhile were virtually car-free: Budapest counted 159 in 1905. America was a different story altogether. Ford’s legendary Tin Lizzie, the Model T, assembled in only twelve hours and eight minutes, was sold in vast numbers. In 1914 alone, Ford’s factory produced and sold 308,162 cars. The rather more frugal Germans owned only 55,000 automobiles by 1914. Even so, the visibility and prestige of cars were high. The Kaiser himself was an enthusiastic driver, as well as the patron of the highly exclusive Allgemeiner Automobil Club with its grand headquarters in the centre of Berlin. Most senior members of the government and junior members of the high aristocracy were also members of the club.
The speed of this new automotive traffic was hardly breathtaking by today’s standards. In 1904, the speed limit in Britain was 20 miles per hour on public highways, while the inner-city limit in Germany was 15 kilometres an hour - 25 for the fast-living capital. These trundling conveyances, however - often quite intimidating with their bulk and shining metal - were irrelevant to a public imagination dominated by press accounts of daredevil races, speed records and intrepid explorers. In 1902, the Deutsche Zeitung ran a long feature about two adventurers, one British and one German, who had equipped a car especially constructed by Panhard-Levassor in France to dr
ive around the globe. They got as far as Nizhni Novgorod before their car broke down. Little setbacks like this, however, only lent these motorized exploits an air of daring, of danger. Journals carried regular reports about sporting events and records, as well as long individual articles about the Tour de France; aircraft pilots and aircraft designs; the future role of military aviation (including Trafalgar-like air battles between fleets of zeppelins); fast, motorized postal services; the chaos caused by private cars in Paris (a situation requiring the attention of several police officers); the ‘incredible speed’ of wireless telegraphy; record-beating sportswomen; and a curious new automobile fad, le camping.
Even disasters had become part of this acceleration of the world. The 1898 novel Futility by Morgan Robertson imagined a huge, ‘unsinkable’ ship, ‘the largest craft afloat and the first of the works of men’, racing for the coveted Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing, but hitting an iceberg, with far too few lifeboats on board. Robertson had called this imaginary craft Titan. The hero recognizes ‘this wanton destruction of life and property for the sake of speed’, but can do nothing about it. Robertson’s novel was prescient: fourteen years later the famous iceberg collision of the record-chasing Titanic shook the world. Early reports reached the newspapers within hours, and special editions were rushed out. There was no time to lose, especially not to the competition. News had become a part of life, and only the latest news was of any interest.
In 1865, the Great Eastern had laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic, connecting Europe and the United States at the grand speed of eight words per minute. Since then, hundreds of thousands of miles of telegraph and telephone cables had been laid, and it was now practically taken for granted that news from anywhere in the world would arrive within hours. The reports ‘hot off the wires’ showed a new world. Where correspondents would have previously collated and shaped the stories they posted to their head offices, events were now related as they were unfolding day by day, fragmentary and immediate, an effect that was accentuated by the famous ‘telegraphic style’ journalists adopted when dictating their stories: using shorter sentences, fewer adverbs, and simpler grammar to avoid confusion at the other end.
Advances in photographic reproduction showed a more immediate, less edited picture of the world. Events no longer had to be reproduced in the standardized, heroic style of an engraver or a draftsman, but could be captured in the raw. War and crime reporters now showed not artists’ reconstructions but images of real explosions, destroyed cities, and victims of violence, particularly those of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-5. There were still the usual pictures of grave, bearded politicians and generals carefully posed for the camera, but the same technology was now used to give a strikingly anarchic image of the world: crowds and corpses, victims of catastrophes and common soldiers, as well as sporting heroes and film stars, all sharing the same few pages, and all photographed days or hours before.
During the late eighteenth century, idealist philosophers had told a stunned world that what we know is only a function of what we perceive, that the only revelation we can rely upon is within the closed universe of our senses - a deeply disturbing thought in a religious age. One century later, in the 1870s, enterprising photographers had driven home this point by fixing instants far too short to be registered by the human eye. In America, Eadweard Muybridge had made multi-image motion studies of people and animals, arresting their progress in a series of individual images over a very short time. The resulting series made a single person (naked for better accuracy and all the more evocative of classical antiquity) look like a sequence of cloned humans while at the same time it lent statuesque dignity to even the most modest tasks. The most stunning aspect of these photos was, however, that they could make visible what had been invisible before: patterns and fleeting instants. Soon cameras were fast enough (exposure times were down to 1/1000 of a second around 1880) to photograph even more ephemeral things, and in 1886 the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach had even photographed a bullet in flight, clearly showing the airflow streaming from it. And photography could do still more: instead of showing only what was too distant or too fast to see with the naked eye, the camera could also expose what was invisible to the naked eye. The novel X-rays could reveal the skeletons inside the living - a small anticipated death. Human senses were clearly not acute enough to take in the rush of the world; technology had outstripped and supplemented them.
Frozen speed: Ernst Mach’s photograph of a
bullet in flight.
Small and cheap mass-produced cameras with fast exposure times and commercial film made the miraculous eye of photography available to non-professionals. The snapshot was born. After receiving his first camera at the age of nine in 1904, the Parisian Jacques Henri Lartigue could hardly contain his delight at the dash and excitement of it all. Born to wealthy parents, this wonderfully gifted child found he could document the world around him, and what he chose to photograph (not surprisingly for a boy) was often the sheer surge of exhilaration produced by speed. A racing car hurled around a curve, its shape distorted by its velocity and followed by a cloud of dust; reckless friends came zooming down hills on home-made go-carts; the horizon of a racing driver captured the road as seen from a car surging ahead at full throttle; a boy jumping into the water was caught floating over the still smooth surface of the water in full, incongruous flight - even a grown woman was seen as a blurred shape, hurrying indecorously across a square.
Nowhere, however, was the rush of the world more evident than in the new medium of cinema, as we shall see in chapter 12. Movies enjoyed huge popularity. Newsreels could show important developments as fast as a reel of film could be transported. For the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Carnarvon in 1911, a film made of the occasion was put on a special express train equipped with a darkroom in one of the carriages. The film was developed during the journey and shown in London on the same evening. The ceremony, witnessed hundreds of miles away only four hours after it had taken place, was not quite as stately as the live version: as usual, the projection was speeded up and showed the Prince and his entourage moving with the jerkiness of robots.
Cinema could do more than just record what had taken place, whether staged or not: it changed the way stories were being told. Silent and beyond verbal wit, and exuberantly exciting in their effects and in their greed for speed and thrills, films soon defined their own aesthetic repertoire. Cuts could startle audiences and move the story along, closeups were used to intensify emotions, insets could provide silent commentaries, fast-forwards could dazzle an entire auditorium. Flowers would burst into bloom before the public’s unbelieving eyes; a caterpillar would build its chrysalis and emerge from it as a splendid butterfly. What took weeks in nature was here the work of a mere minute. The theatre could not compete. Speculating about the demise of melodrama on the stage, a critic observed of the cinema: ‘The swiftness develops the breathlessness and excitement [that] the melodrama proper fails to evoke.’
Capturing the Moving World
Artists were fascinated by this accelerated reality and its possibilities, by its fragmentation into thousandths of seconds and individual frames of film, its forces pulling it around and twisting it, by the sheer energy and sexual charge of speed and its technological agents. The cult of speed and technology was an important element of the pessimistic vision of H. G. Wells and his monstrous future worlds. In his hands, machines became not exhilarating, quasi-sexual devices, but engines of destruction. The Land Ironclads (1906) describes a trench war with almost uncanny prescience, with soldiers bogged down in indecisive bloodshed, a war suddenly and cruelly transformed by the arrival of ironclad vehicles with mechanical guns rolling over the enemy entrenchments. A young officer has just been busy explaining to a war correspondent why the enemy could not possibly win:
Their men aren’t brutes enough; that’s the trouble. They’re a crowd of devitalized townsmen, and that’s the truth of the matter. T
hey’re clerks, they’re factory hands, they’re students, they’re civilized men…but they’re poor amateurs at war. They’ve got no physical staying power, and that’s the whole thing ... Our boys of fourteen can give their grown men points …
The ironclads, however, have no difficulty overcoming the heroic resistance of the ‘burly, sun-tanned horsemen’ defending the trenches. The young officer’s regiment falls under the rapid fire of the attacking ‘few score young men in atrociously unfair machines’, leaving the journalist stunned: ‘“Manhood versus Machinery” occurred to him as a suitable headline ... He strolled as near the lined-up prisoners as the sentinels seemed disposed to permit, and surveyed them and compared their sturdy proportions with those of their lightly build captors. “Smart degenerates,” he muttered, “Anaemic cockneymen”.’
To other British authors the rush of velocity seemed otherwise far away. With the keen eye of an admiring outsider, the young T. S. Eliot captured an attitude towards the future that had nothing to do with enthusiasm or great confidence:
