by Adam Frank
Galileo, however, was stunned by his inability to influence the Church and stung by the sentence of house arrest. “This universe that I have extended a thousand times has now shrunk to the confines of my body”, he wrote in a letter to his beloved daughter.61 Within the confines of his villa, an unbowed Galileo began a remarkable period of experimentation and discovery that would provide the outlines of a radical new physics. Just as he had challenged the worldview of Ptolemaic astronomy early in his life, in his last years Galileo finally overturned the physics of Aristotle.
Galileo’s greatest achievement during these last years was the development of an experimental method for physics. For centuries scholars had relied on the authority of classical authors, and issues such as the relation between force and motion were still pinned to Aristotle’s philosophical works. Galileo began to investigate nature directly, developing ingenious experiments using wooden wedges, balls and water clocks that allowed ideas about the nature of motion to be tested rather than simply debated. In this way he established a scientific practice that would be emulated across disciplines. Fifty years later, Isaac Newton would use Galileo’s discoveries to develop his own groundbreaking theories.
THE RENAISSANCE REAWAKENING TO COSMOLOGY
The universe as a whole and the origins of time were not the explicit concern of Copernicus’ grand project, which only addressed a subset of the five questions. “The Earth is to the Heavens... as a finite is to an infinite magnitude”, he wrote. “It’s not at all clear how far this immensity stretches out.”62 While Copernicus recognized the implications of his expansion of celestial dimensions, he did not care to conjecture how far the universe ultimately extended. Others, however, were ready to take on questions of both cosmic architecture and the infinity of space.
The immense size of the Copernican universe revived discussions about infinity. Throughout the medieval period, scholars debated what lay beyond the last, starry sphere in Ptolemy’s model. Many were loath to admit the possibility of a true void or vacuum, a physical space devoid of matter. By shifting the Earth away from the centre of creation and replacing it with the sun, Copernicus raised the possibility that there might not be a true centre to creation. And with the Earth thrown from its perch, scholars began to reconsider the full dimensions of space and its relation to matter.
Part of the revival of infinity lay in the revival of atomism—the original Greek theory that matter was composed of tiny particles separated by pure void. Natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon and Edward Sherburne derived their interest in atomism from their growing interest in chemistry.63 Reading classical Greek philosophers in the context of contemporary debates about the heavens, they conceived of an infinite universe of atoms, and of the infinite voids that separated these particles.
Others found inspiration for infinity from different sources. Giordano Bruno, the radical philosopher and former Dominican friar, also advocated for an infinite universe of stars, planets and even life. But while famous for his heretical ideas—for which the Catholic Church burned him at the stake—Bruno was never a systematic natural philosopher. William Gilbert, the English doctor who carried out early studies of magnetism, was more coherent in his thinking about infinities. Though it was not clear if he fully accepted the Copernican world system, his contemplation of the idea drove him to question the location of the stars on a finite outer sphere: “What, then, is the inconceivably great space between us and these remotest fixed stars? And what is the vast immeasurable amplitude and height of the imaginary sphere in which they are supposed to be set?”64
Infinite space was by no means universally accepted. Kepler, unlike Copernicus, was more than willing to address questions of the spatial dimensions of the universe. Believing an infinite number of stars could be ruled out by logic alone, Kepler rejected a universe of infinite extent; “all number of things is actually finite for the very reason that it is a number”.65
While a debate raged about infinite space, cosmic questions of time found more agreement. Like most of his contemporaries, Kepler stuck to biblical orthodoxy in considering time and infinity. The cosmic clock had begun with the creation. Extrapolating the patriarchs’ ages from the stories in the Bible, he calculated the exact date of Genesis, arriving at the date 3992 BCE for the creation of the world.66
It is both remarkable and telling that a man of Kepler’s intellectual capacity, a man so willing to challenge orthodoxies on the spatial structure and dimensions of the universe, would be so unwilling to push against those same orthodoxies as they related to the origins of time and the cosmos. And he was not alone in this regard. Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries few scholars were willing to challenge biblical authority on these issues.
In 1650, Bishop James Ussher of Ireland published what would become the definitive biblical chronology of the world. Even here, the shifting institutional facts driven by the world’s material changes played their role. Ussher’s work was inseparably bound to the Protestant Reformation. An English Protestant, Ussher was driven to his study of time’s origin by Catholicism’s claims that it alone embraced the true account of God, man and the world.67 In a remarkable feat of literary scholarship, Ussher’s chronology drew on Persian, Greek and Roman sources in order to create a history of the ancient world that remains in remarkable agreement with modern accounts. It was the truly ancient history, of course, that Ussher got wrong, pinning the date of God’s creative act to October 23, 4004 BCE. While scholars such as Kepler, and even Isaac Newton, created their own biblical chronologies, Ussher’s work was seen as the authority. His version of cosmogony—a timeline for cosmic history—would be difficult to shake even as the scientific revolution began in earnest.
BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS: CLOCK, COSMOS AND THE CADENCE OF INFLUENCE
The failure of Renaissance thinkers to break free of biblical time might at first seem surprising. How could men and women who were so willing to challenge orthodoxy on the nature of the universe’s architecture be so unable to move beyond biblically based claims of its five-thousand-year history? But as we explore the braided history of cosmic and human time, we should take note of the surges and swells of influence driving changes in both. Like waves rolling back and forth on a stormy channel, at some historical moments cultural influences surge forward, pushing cosmological science and its vision of time onward. And at other moments changes in science surge forward, forcing culture and its use of time to respond.
Changes in the experience and conception of time always originate in our encounters with the material reality of the world. They begin as we find new ways to process matter—wood, metal, fibre, glass—and in turn these new forms of material engagement allow us to change how we organize culture through time and in time. “Through time” is the way human institutions evolve out of new forms of material engagement, taking on a life of their own and propagating across generations. “In time” is the day-to-day organization of our lives that these institutions force on us: the structured school day, workday and so on. Together, they represent the flow downward from material engagement to new institutional facts and new human experiences of time. The invention of the clock and its rapid diffusion across Europe is a key example of this downward flow. But the changes in European culture opened up, even demanded, new accounts of the cosmic order. The beginnings of scientific practice, so evident in the Copernican revolution, represent an upward flow from new forms of material engagement into the realm of ideas, theories and cosmological conception.
Nowhere is this braiding of cosmic and human time more evident than in the metaphor of the clockwork universe. It is in this era that the first description appears of the cosmos as an intricate machine like a clock. As early as the thirteenth century, John of Sacrobosco would refer to the universe as the machina mundi, the machine of the world.68 But this was before the diffusion of clocks. By 1377 mechanical time had made sufficient inroads into Europe that Nicole Oresme, in his Book of the Heavens and the World, could make the link betwe
en clock and cosmos concrete. Oresme described the world “as a regular clockwork that was neither fast nor slow, never stopped, and worked in summer and winter”. The movement of the planets was akin to the well-balanced escarpment driving a precision clockwork. As Oresme wrote, “This is similar to when a person has made an horloge [a clock] and sets it in motion, and it then moves by itself.”69
People had refashioned their daily, intimate worlds to the beat of the clock, so it was only natural that their conception of the surrounding universe should follow. In the centuries to come, however, Newtonian science would make the clock metaphor concrete by rebuilding the laws of physics so that they marched to a steady beat of cosmic time. As Newton’s mechanics drove the age of the machine forward, the braiding of time, culture and cosmology would tighten.
Chapter 4
COSMIC MACHINES, ILLUMINATED NIGHT AND THE FACTORY CLOCK
From Newton’s Universe to Thermodynamics and the Industrial Revolution
CROWLEY IRONWORKS, WINLATON, ENGLAND • 1701
Damn the clock and damn the clock warden.
The bellowsman was tired as he looked up at one of the always present clocks mounted on the high wall. It had been a long shift at the fire—four hours straight, keeping the flames high and the iron ore flowing like blood in the devil’s veins. The man looked at his swollen hands, blackened with the fire’s smoke. It had been more than six years since he came north to County Durham and Crowley Ironworks.1 When his Sarah died he had been forced to leave farming for the sake of his children. “Crowley has something different going on,” they said at the tavern. “There’s regular pay from him.” Pay was what he needed to keep his girls from going hungry, so he packed what they had and travelled north.
Crowley was good to his families, that was for certain, and the bellowsman was thankful for that. There was schooling for the children and no family was allowed to starve even if one of the men was injured. But the price they paid was steep.
He stood at the bellows cursing under his breath as the clock warden passed. His pay was going to be reduced again. He had broken another of the damn codes. There were so many, who could keep track? Almost all of their codes and laws were envious of his time, as if the old bastard watched over his shoulder for every breath he took.
“Makin’ sure you don’t waste Crowley’s time,” the clock warden would say, and drop his pay because he took too long to relieve himself. For God’s sake, was it his fault it took time to let his water down? The clock warden didn’t care. Order 103 of the code! Order 40 of the code! He leaned down hard on the bellows and looked across to the other end of the ironworks. Everywhere he looked he saw men busy with their duties and everywhere they looked was the clock, the damn clock warden and old man Crowley’s code.2
TWO MEN, ONE NEW TIME
Sometimes revolutions begin in the mind of a single genius. Sometimes they come from the flesh of the encountered world—wood and iron and the shop floor. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.
Isaac Newton and Ambrose Crowley were contemporaries. Each was born in the middle of the seventeenth century and each would live into the early years of the eighteenth century.3 A genius physicist, Isaac Newton would re-create time and space, establishing the theoretical mechanics that became the skeleton of the industrial revolution’s machine-dominated world. Ambrose Crowley’s name did not echo down history as Newton’s did but in his way he too saw the future of time and set it into living form.
FIGURE 4.1. English razor factory, circa 1783. The industrial revolution made time an explicit part of material engagement as working life became ever more bound to the clock.
BOUND TO TIME: CROWLEY’S IRON LAWS
A devout Quaker born into a family of ironwrights, Ambrose Crowley was both respected and feared, ridiculed and lauded.4 Sensing a growing spirit of innovation and expansion, Crowley as a young man was “not prepared to accept the restrictions of the trade” as it existed in the West Midlands, the so-called Black Country.5 In the seventeenth century, cumbersome geography and poor transport had kept English iron making a small-scale affair. Rising from obscurity, Crowley overcame these restrictions by setting up his ironworks in the village of Winlaton, near Newcastle. His operation was close to local supplies of raw “bar iron” and near seaports allowing access to Swedish iron supplies. Newcastle also boasted proximity to coal (in the north) and markets (in London, to the south).6
Crowley’s new factory model of ironworking succeeded due to his genius for organizing human activity across space and time. Originally created to produce nails, the Winlaton ironworks diversified in 1690, adding a long list of products including stoves and cookware for domestic markets. Significant naval contracts in 1707 allowed Crowley to buy up a rival operation at Swalwell.7 His iron empire soon became the largest industrial operation of its time outside of the sprawling London shipyards. In 1702 the Crowley Ironworks employed 197 workers. In the second half of the eighteenth century it would employ more than a thousand. In scale at least, it was the first vision of the modern factory.
Crowley was a “hard, demanding man, too forceful to win friends”, and he brought an uncompromising sense of purpose to his project of re-creating iron manufacturing.8 Organization and labour were the major limitations Crowley encountered in developing his new model for iron production. Agents were sent far and wide (even across the Channel) to find able workers. To manage so many men working on a single site, Crowley enforced a set of rules to organize and manage the operation.9 In these rules, The Law Book of the Crowley Ironworks, a first vision of the new industrial time, would be glimpsed.
In order to maintain the flow of the operation and ensure adherence to his rules, Crowley created a new position, that of the warden.10 Also called the monitor or timekeeper, the warden slept on the premises and kept exacting records of each employee’s comings and goings. Under the warden’s watchful eye, the factory was to be precisely timed. As the Law Book states,
Every morning at 5 a clock the Warden is to ring the bell for beginning to work, at eight a clock for breakfast, at half an hour after for work again, at twelve a clock for dinner, at one to work, and at eight to ring for leaving work and all to be lock’d up.11
Labour was long and hard at the Crowley Ironworks, with employees expected to put in six-day weeks of eighty hours.12 In spite of these long hours, workers had to be punctual and avoid wasting time—that newly recognized precious commodity. The warden was to deduct from a worker’s pay time that was “wasted” in drinking, smoking or conversation. A greater offence was to alter time. Severe penalties were laid down for tampering with the master clock. Informing against others who sinned against the clock (as well as informing against loiterers in general) was encouraged.
Crowley’s organizational genius made him a wealthy man, but he was more than the caricature of the uncaring industrialist. With his wife, Mary Owen, Crowley had eleven children, only six of whom would survive past infancy.13 The trauma of such sustained loss, combined with his Quakerism, made Crowley sensitive to the plight of his workers and their families. Many of Crowley’s rules governed their care, including schooling, medical treatment and the disposition of injured workers who could no longer provide for their families. Law 97, for example, included a preamble that specified “the raising and continued supporting of a stock to relieve such of my workmen and their families as may be by sickness or other means reduced to that poverty as not to be able to support themselves”.14 In authoring the Law Book, Crowley imagined not just an efficient business but also a kind of utopia in which reason, when applied to the organization of society, would bring a better life to all.
It was Crowley’s innovations in work time, however, as radical as they were effective, that established his place in time’s history. In effect, he was taking a half step into the industrial revolution. The actual means of production (a term that would gain new importance with Karl Marx in the next century) remained enmeshed in the old ways—the ironworking itself
was still done in small units or “shops”. What had changed was each worker’s “imperatives of time” as they now needed to fit their lives into the factory’s time and the contours of the factory’s day.
Crowley’s employees laboured in the birth of a new kind of human time, one whose conception had occurred centuries before with the rapid diffusion of the mechanical clock. By the 1700s, during Crowley’s lifetime, clock technology and manufacturing had become sufficiently advanced that the devices now appeared in the homes of merchant and lord alike.15 It is notable, however, that the minute hand came into widespread use only in the late seventeenth century—the exact moment when Crowley was building his ironworks.16
It was the minute hand, in fact, that would propel human time into a new dimension. The minute was a small but workable unit of time. Minutes can be experienced; we can watch them pass and they can become the raw material of new engagements with time. The advent of the minute hand—destined to be watched by generations of students in school, factory workers on the shop floor and office workers at their desks—heralded an irrevocable change. It announced a new kind of time that would govern the home, the workplace and, most important, the laboratory. While Ambrose Crowley was constructing the first draft of industrial time, science was rebuilding its own definitions of time, and to complete that step it would need Isaac Newton.
THE DIVINE SENSORIUM: NEWTON’S ABSOLUTE TIME AND ABSOLUTE SPACE
Born in 1643, Isaac Newton led a most unusual life that extended far beyond his scientific genius.17 Beginning his work as a teenager, Newton would eventually reshape almost every branch of physics and mathematics. Yet he all but ended his scientific career by his late forties, when he left his position at the University of Cambridge and joined Parliament. Newton became master of the mint, a position meant to be something of an empty honour but which he took seriously, reforming English currency and actively pursuing counterfeiters.18 A lifelong study of alchemy may have led to the mercury poisoning that some scholars claim accounted for his eccentric behaviour in his later years.19 In his personal life Newton appeared to be as singular as he was in his professional efforts. Capable of both generous friendship and intolerant fury, he was an enigma to the people who knew him. By most accounts Newton died a virgin, having had no significant romantic attachments throughout his eighty-five-year life.20
