ELECTRIC TIME
Today I phoned a naturalist, a nocturnal animal-call expert who lives in Ithaca, New York. I was lucky to get him in. I wanted him to identify the owl that I’d seen in March, because on other nights I had also heard its call. Yesterday I’d been on the Web and downloaded a call from an owl site, but it wasn’t right. I downloaded some other likely calls, but couldn’t get them to play on my computer. Frustrated, I turned to Lang Elliott. I told him my problem and crudely imitated the trill that I’d heard earlier in the spring. “Give me a second,” he said. He scanned his library of recorded owl calls and played for me what he thought was the best candidate. It was exactly the call I’d heard. As always (I’d phoned him before about other calls), he was right on the money. “Eastern screech-owl,” he said. “Not uncommon in cities.”
There’s something about the phone—the immediacy and instant intimacy—that I still prefer over the Internet. With specialists I can always get more quickly to the information I need. Telephone technology was only two years old when Muybridge photographed Stanford’s Pegasus, yet a telephone set had already been installed in the White House. President Rutherford B. Hayes knew a winner when he saw one.
The telephone was the child of the telegraph, which had been proliferating across the country since the first message was sent by Samuel Morse in 1844, more than three decades earlier. It’s hard to say which was more revolutionary, the telephone or the telegraph, but the effect of instant communication across a great distance was revolutionary. The time once occupied by space had been cancelled at the speed of light.
After Morse’s inaugural message, the subsequent acceptance and growth of the telegraph was extraordinary. It completely outpaced the adoption of any previous technology. By 1851 the first transatlantic cable had been laid, and by 1861 North America was criss-crossed from coast to coast with telegraph wire. Speed became everything. The telegraph meant that news from distant events took minutes instead of days to reach far-flung places, and as telegraph lines began to stretch into Asia and the other continents, the concept of a global “now” inserted itself into the average citizens consciousness, at least in Western nations. Great solitudes of time and remoteness were drawn into the electric web. This global “now” was further reinforced when U.S. railroads initiated central time signals. In 1851 the first time-beats were sent across the railway network from the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, thereby synchronizing all railway clocks across the four newly instated time zones of the United States to within a second.
It is worth noting here that the institution of time zones was also the initiation of an invidious process, one that has been accelerated by atomic clocks in the present—namely, the divorce of time from the earth. The abstraction of time zones meant that “noon” was no longer dependent on the position of the sun. The angle of the sun is different at one edge of a time zone than the other, even though the clocks in both places register noon. As clocks became more precise, the separation of abstract time from earthly time grew larger, until, as we have seen, the earth itself became outmoded as an accurate timepiece. But these anomalies hardly gave pause during the breathless growth of new technologies in the nineteenth century.
Newspapers also proliferated and expanded as the appetite for world events grew. Somewhere in that decade after the invention of the telegraph, a reporter filed the first electronic report from the field. By 1848 several large American dailies had realized the immense potential of the telegraph as a news-gathering (and news-distributing) medium. They formed a collective organization for sharing news by linked telegraphs, which eventually became known as the Associated Press. But the telegraph was just the beginning of time-altering media.
The pace of invention and change in the mid-nineteenth century was astounding: photography in 1839, the telegraph in 1844, the phonograph and telephone in 1877. Even Victorian clergymen, such as the English author Charles Kingsley, were caught up in the technological hubris. In 1848 he wrote, “Give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard’s liners and the electric telegraph, are to me…signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe.”
More harmony was on the way. In 1878 the first telephone exchange came into operation, and Alexander Graham Bell introduced telephones to England. Six years later reliable long-distance connections existed between Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City, though it wasn’t until the next century that a successful transatlantic phone cable was laid. Telephone networks existed in most industrialized nations by 1900. Benjamin Franklin may have coined the phrase “Time is money,” but Alexander Graham Bell was the first to turn time into coin, long-distance charges being the most direct translation of time into money ever.
The telephone not only linked two people, it linked separate geographical locations. The telephone, as Marshall McLuhan once quipped, allows you to be in two places at once. It seems a facile observation but it’s quite true. If the person at the other end of the line is beside an ocean and they hold their phone to a window, you’ll hear the waves. It’s not just a conversation: separate ambiences also overlap. The sounds around you at your end of the line blend with the background sounds at the other end. Telephones collapse geographical space into personal space.
But something also happens to time. When people are asked to estimate the amount of time they spent on a phone call, they consistently come up short. Could it be that time and space are so intimately linked that it also takes twice as much perceived time to be in two places at once? It’s hard to say. My phone call to Lang Elliott was short, perhaps a few minutes, though I’ll see the real duration when I get the bill. I won’t argue it. My phone company has been in business for a hundred and thirty years.
THE TIME MIRROR: BIRTH OF THE CINEMA
The closing decades of the nineteenth century heralded the arrival of the most extraordinary manipulation of time ever, though it had been gestating in middle-class parlours for decades before. The Victorian obsession with moving images began with the introduction of the phenakistoscope in 1832. The phenakistoscope was a slotted disc with a series of images, usually dancing or juggling figures, arranged around its outer margin. When the disc was spun in front of a mirror, you could look through the whirling slots and see the reflected figures moving. The Victorians were hooked. The phenakistoscope was succeeded by a series of tongue-twisting gizmos: the zoetrope in 1867; Reynaud’s praxinoscope in 1877; and, finally, Eadweard Muybridge’s own contribution, the zoopraxiscope in 1879, which had the added feature of being able to project images onto a screen from photographs printed on a glass disc.
All of these motion picture forerunners, in common with today’s cinema, relied on the lower limit of our speed of perception. The eye blended individual “frames” when the revolving discs reached a certain threshold velocity. The key achievement was the illusion of smooth, continuous movement. Like Zeno’s Arrow, each image was still in and of itself, but when each successive image was combined in a series, movement emerged miraculously. It was the opposite of Muybridge’s strategy: instead of capturing movement too fast to be seen, the illusion of movement was achieved by tricking the eye. And when photography was blended with this technology, something entirely new was created—a kind of time mirror that could play back what it had reflected. The arrow flew.
In the beginning these “moving picture” experiences were very personal. Only one or two people could look into the zoetrope or the first praxinoscopes. Moving pictures did not become a group experience until the early 1890s, when Charles-Émile Reynaud devised a way to project his praxinoscope onto a screen.
Then Thomas Edison got involved. Fresh from inventing another time-based medium, the phonograph, he decided to tackle motion pictures. Together with his assistant William Dickson, he designed and built the kinetoscope in 1892. In the beginning it was a coin-operated device for penny arcades, but
he later adopted a projector that used an optical lantern to project the action onto a screen. Dickson also standardized the width of movie film at thirty-five millimetres and invented a precise, motor-driven shutter and sprocket system to feed the unexposed film through the camera at a constant rate. Their equipment permitted the rapid growth of the motion picture industry—it was a gold mine.
Edison’s first penny-arcade style Kinetoscope Parlor, the forerunner of the movie theatre, opened in New York City in 1894. The “movies” were more like film clips, and they had titles such as Trapeze, Wrestling, Barber Shop, Blacksmiths and Cock Fight. But people loved them. Soon, other kinetoscope parlours opened in Atlantic City, San Francisco and Chicago. Meanwhile, in France, the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, built an all-in-one movie camera and projector. It was hand-held and portable and could be hand-cranked. The Lumières called their invention the cinématographe, and they patented it in 1895. The film speed they settled on—sixteen frames per second—became the industry norm until the advent of sound film in the late 1920s, when twenty-four frames per second prevailed. They showed their first films in Paris in 1895. Much more dramatic than the scenes of daily life found in the Edison films, the Lumières’ scenes of a train entering a station or a horse-drawn carriage galloping towards the camera had audiences gasping.
In 1897 the first movie theatre, replete with projector and screen, opened in Paris. Five years later the Electric Theatre opened in Los Angeles, and Georges Méliès and the Lumière brothers began making films in earnest, creating hundreds of them by the turn of the century. Méliès even screened the first popular science-fiction film, Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), in 1902. It premiered several film techniques: a narrative storyline, a plot, trick photography, dissolves, superimpositions, stop-motion and slow motion. In 1903 Edwin S. Porter’s ten-minute opus western, The Great Train Robbery, heralded the beginning of many film techniques still in use today. Porter developed film editing, and as a result The Great Train Robbery was one of the earliest films to be shot out of chronological sequence. It also featured cross-cutting between simultaneous scenes, one scene with rear projection and two panning shots. The wholesale manipulation of narrative time—of condensing hours and days into minutes—had commenced.
THE BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES
Were you alive in 1902, a typical Saturday afternoon might find you paying your phone bill or going through your stereograph collection. Stereographs were three-dimensional photographs, almost like holograms, that were viewed through a hand-held device called a stereoscope. But they were better than photographs, because they were like being there. Looking into the stereoscope, you left your body behind and went on a trip through time and space. You could visit exotic places and people, and you could witness, first-hand, great news stories of the recent past—train wrecks and battlefields.
A little later you might go out to a movie theatre and see time sped up with stop-motion photography. Back at home you could put on a record and listen to popular music, a time-based art performance captured like a photograph. You might make a long-distance phone call to a friend in another city. By 1902 time was already highly mutable. Instantaneous where it had once been delayed (instead of waiting days for a letter, you could telegraph or telephone immediately), and mixed where it had once been continuous (in films, bits and pieces from the past as well from imagined futures combined themselves with the present). Time became putty in the hands of the media.
TIME-LAPSE PHOTOGRAPHY
The flicker of film or of malfunctioning fluorescent lights provides a sort of ambient time-lapse effect close to, but not as intense as, the effect of a stroboscopic light in a dark room. There is nothing quite like the feeling of dancing under a strobe light—it’s like visiting another world. Your disassociated movements, time-sampled by the strobe, take on a fluid, trailing grace. Time-lapse photography is similar, though the spaces between each sample, or frame, are longer and the duration has been removed. It is really time compression. Successive frames of a movie are captured at a rate slower than they are projected. When replayed at normal speed, time is accelerated. Incremental processes that are normally too slow to be seen, like plant growth or stars wheeling through the night sky, are revealed by this technique.
Time-lapse photography appeared for the first time in 1897, in a feature film by Georges Méliès called Carrefour de l’opéra. It was an astonishing novelty, though cinematographers continued to elaborate its potential. The technique reached a high point sixty years later with John Ott’s 1956 documentary The Secrets of Life. Ott’s sequences of blossoms opening in full colour had all the beauty and dynamism of fireworks. I saw the film as a child, and it no doubt inspired me the day I watched my rhododendron flowers opening.
I wonder if H. G. Wells wasn’t inspired likewise—not by Ott of course, but by Méliès. For Wells, The Time Machine, published close to the release of Carrefour de l’opéra, contains a visionary passage that describes his protagonist’s journey into the future. The resemblance to time-lapse films is unmistakable:
As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.
Time-lapse photography, at least in the twentieth century, became the purview of documentaries showing the building of bridges, spiders constructing webs, fruit rotting and, more recently, as exemplified in the 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi, clouds, traffic and cities. (Time-lapse films of clouds completely changed how I saw them. As a child I thought of clouds as single entities, as in Wordsworth’s line from “The Daffodils”: “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” But time-lapse films showed me that clouds are more like puffs of steam forming continuously over one spot on the landscape.) Now time-lapse imagery is as commonplace as the fast-forward feature on home video players, through which, in a form of virtual time travel, scenes can be slowed down, speeded up, run backwards or played in slow motion.
SLOW MOTION
Slow motion had to wait for cameras that could capture more than sixteen frames a second, the limit of the first kinetoscope cameras designed by Edison. It is a testament to how fast movie-making evolved that by 1894 the French cinematographer Étienne-Jules Marey constructed a camera that could record seven hundred frames per second, though his technique did not reach mainstream cinema until much later. In 1904 the German August Musger filed the first patent for a slow-motion film camera, but it lapsed, and the Ernemann Company of Dresden introduced an almost identical slow-motion technique in 1914. Slow motion soon became a standard part of filmmaking, and several directors used it effectively, particularly after playback speed jumped from sixteen to twenty-four frames a second. Akira Kurosawa was one of the earliest directors to use slow motion, showcasing it in his 1954 movie The Seven Samurai. Later, Sam Peckinpah used it to heighten the realism of violence in his films. More recently, ultra-slow motion and a technique now known as “bullet motion” were used extensively in The Matrix.
With the advent of computer-assisted cinematography, it became possible to play various aspects of a s
cene at actual speed while other aspects played in slow motion or were even stopped. So an actor could walk through frozen explosions as if they were museum dioramas. Currently, in film and video, time can be divided, run backwards, forwards, divided and run forwards and backwards simultaneously, slowed down and speeded up in an infinite number of combinations. We get to play God with time, assembling a new timescape out of digital pulses and celluloid.
But it is only slow motion that lets us experience time from the perspective of the ultra-fast, like our Femtonian friends. There is a graceful, floating quality to slow motion that smoothes out the jumpiness of real time. A slow-motion film of a drop of water falling into a pond becomes a symphony of liquid geometry. The wobbling, elliptical drop disappears into the water amid a perfectly circular wave that rises like a glass crown. But then, astonishingly, as the crown subsides, the drop rises up again from the centre on a stalk of liquid. As it falls back and is replaced by still another rebounding drop, the crown flattens into a ripple. This is something no one could have imagined, or seen, before.
In slow motion the instinctual movements of a cat become pure choreography. Dropped with its back to the ground, a cat executes a mid-air ballet as it deftly twists itself upright just before a perfect four-point landing on the grass. If we could enter the world of slow motion, we would become the quick-moving, jerky figures we see in time-lapse photography. But there are occasions when we do enter the world of slow motion in real life, when, for instance, we are accelerated by a traumatic event. Several years ago my daughter and I were in a triple streetcar accident in Toronto, and I experienced first-hand the power of adrenaline to slow time.
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