VV(18): The clock inside ...

[Dave Monroe]

"The clock inside the Gare du Nord read 11:17: Paris time minus five 
minutes, Belgian railway time plus four minutes, mid-Europe time minus 56 
minutes.  To Melanie, who had forgotten her traveling clock--who had 
forgotten everything--the hand might have stood anywhere." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. 
1, p. 393)

>From David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the 
Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983), Ch. 17, "Nor Could He 
Compete with Us," pp. 274-89 ...

"The big changes here were, first, the general increase of wealth, which 
brought watches within the reach of an ever-growing number of people; and 
second, the construction of railways, with their emphasis on timetables and 
precision.  The railway companies themselves and their employees were 
destined to become a major market for watches, but even more their riders, 
who not only wanted to know the hour and minute in order to catch trains but 
found their entire consciousness of time altered by the requirements and 
opportunities of a railway world.  Trains not only left, they arrived at a 
destination; and it was just as important to passengers to know when they 
had arrived as when they left." (p. 285)

[Reminds me, on "consciousness ... altered by ... a railway world," see 
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and 
Perception of Time and Space (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1986).  But 
continuing from Landes ...]

"The invention of the telegraph ... first tried in 1837 on the London and 
North Western Railway, made it possible to transmit almost instantaneously 
an exact hour and minute from the central office to every point on the line. 
  The effect was to establish a standard time for all those served by a 
given network.  The next step was to unify railway practice: on September 
22, 1847, the British Railway Clearing House recommended that each company 
adopt Greenwich time at all their stations 'as soon as the Post Office 
permits them to do so.'" (p. 285)

"The effectiveness of the change depended, of course, on the creation of a 
national time service ....  It was the newly discovered technique of 
electrical timekeeping that made this possible--that, and the enterprise of 
george B. Airy, astronomer-royal ..." (pp. 285-6)

"What was possible in Britain was also feasible in the major continental 
countries: wherever there were railroads, there soon developed standard 
times and time services, and these in turn prepared the way for a single 
national hour as a reference time for all.  Only the largest countries such 
as the United States or Russia ran into difficulty, because they spanned so 
much territory that no single hour would do.  The Americans solved this 
problem a generation later, in 1883, with the institution of time zones, 
which led in turn to international agreements for a similar partition of the 
entire earth.  The only difficulty there was the decision regarding the base 
measurement--where to locate zero longitude.  The British and just about 
every other nation in the world favored Greenwich, which navigators 
everywhere had long taken as their point of reference.  The French held out 
for the Paris observatory ....  So in October 1884 the International 
Meridian Conference voted to mark the prime meridian at Greenwich, while 
France remained odd man out for another generation.  Finally, in 1911, the 
French bowed to ecumenical usage and voted to establish a legal time defined 
as 'Paris Mean Time, retarded by 9 minutes 21 seconds.'  But this was 
nothing other than Greenwich Mean Time, without the word 'Greenwich,' which 
the French have trouble pronouncing anyway.  Thus were national 
susceptibilities salved--but not solved.  The French had great difficulty 
living by British clocks and chose to set their timepieces one hour ahead." 
(p. 286)

Landes here recommends ...

Howse, Derek.  Greenwich Time and the Discovery
   of the Longitude.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.

And hopefully I'll get around to ...

Blaise, Clark.  Time Lord: Sir Sandford
   Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time.
   New York: Pantheon, 2000.

But in the meantime ...

http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/mill/meridian.htm

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/world_tzones.html

And do note the positively Pynchonian topoi in play here: time, space, 
consciousness, industrialization, standardization, modernization, 
nationalism, globalization, networks, postal systems, media, communication, 
technology, mechanization ...



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