VV(18): The clock inside cont'd ...

[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 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA: 
Harvard UP, 1983), Ch. 1, "The Nature of Time," pp. 10-35 ...

"As every child knows, there is only one time.  It flows uniformly and may 
be divided into equal parts anywhere along the line.  This is the time Isaac 
Newton defined in 1687: 'Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, 
and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything 
external.'  In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Immanuel Kant rejected the 
Newtonian theory of absolute, objective time (because it could not possibly 
be experienced) and maintained that time was a subjective form or foundation 
to all experience.  But even though it was subjective, it was also 
universal--the same for everybody.... before the late nineteenth century, no 
one (with the possible exception of Laurence Sterne, who explored private 
time in Tristram Shandy) systematically questioned the homogeneity of time.  
  The evidence for it was written on the faces of the millions of clocks and 
watches manufactured every year." (p. 11)

"The most momentous development in the history of uniform, public time since 
the invention of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth century was the 
introduction of standard time at the end of the nineteenth century.  A 
pioneer in promoting uniform time was the Canadian engineer San[d]ford 
Fleming ....  The use of the telegraph 'subjects the whole surface of the 
globe to the observation of civilized communities and leaves no interval of 
time between widely separated places proportionate to their distances 
apart.'  This system mixes up day and night ...." (p. 11)

[Tres panoptique, non?  But to continue ...]

"The most famous supporter of standard time, Count Helmuth von Moltke, in 
1891 appealed to the German Parliament for its adoption.  He pointed out 
that Germany had five different time zones, which would impede the 
coordination of military planning ....  When Fleming sent Moltke's speech to 
the editor of The Empire for publication, he did not dream that in 1914 the 
world would go to war according to mobilization timetables facilitated by 
standard time, which he thought would rather engender cooperation and 
peace." (p. 12)

[This, by the way, was the elder Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, Prussian 
Army Chief of Staff who would die later that year, not to be confused with 
his nephew, also named Helmuth von Moltke, who would be German Army Chief of 
Staff at the outbreak of WWI.  To continue ...]

"Despite all the good scientific and military arguments for world time, it 
was the railroad companies and not the governments that were the first to 
institute it." (p. 12)

"In 1884 representatives of twenty-five countries that convened at the Prime 
Meridian Conference in Washington proposed to establish Greenwich as the 
zero meridian, determined the exact length of the day, divided the earth 
into twenty-four time zones one hour apart, and fixed a precise beginning of 
the universal day.  But the world was slow to adopt this system, for all its 
obvious practicality." (p. 12)

"Among the countries of Western Europe, France had the most chaotic 
situation, with some regions having four different times ....  The railroads 
used Paris time, which was nine minutes and twenty-one seconds ahead of 
Greenwich.  A law of 1891 made it the legal of France, but the railroads 
actually ran five minutes behind it in order to give passengers extra time 
to board: thus the clocks inside the railroad stations were five minutes 
ahead of those on the tracks.  In 1913 a French journalist, L. Houllevigue, 
explained this 'retrograde practice' as a function of national pride ....  
The French law declared that 'the legal time in France and Algeria is the 
mean Paris time slowed nine minutes and twenty-one seconds.'  Houllevigue 
pointed out the Anglophobic intent of the wording: 'By a pardonable 
reticence, the law abstained from saying that the time so defined is that of 
Greenwich, and our self-respect can pretend that we have adopted the time of 
Argentan, which happens to lie almost exactly on the same meridian as the 
English observatory.'  In spite of their previous isolation the French 
finally took the lead in the movement for unified world time based on the 
guidelines of 1884.  If the zero meridian was to be on English soil, at 
least the institution of world time would take place in France." (p. 13)

"The wireless telegraph made it all possible." (p. 13)

"At 10 o'clock on the morning of July 1, 1913, the Eiffel Tower sent the 
first time signal transmitted around the world.  The independence of local 
times began to collapse once the framework of a global electronic network 
was established." (p. 13)

And a little over three weeks later, on 24 July 1913 ... and note that 
"Around the time of the International Conference on Time various proposals 
for calendar reform were made" as well (p. 14).  But again, note themes 
here: time, space, communication, standardization, commercialization, 
nationalism, colonialism, militarization, not to mention measurement, 
definition, division of an otherwise presumably undifferentiated continuum 
...

Recommended reading ...

Wilcox, Donald J.  Measure of Times Past:
   Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric
   of Relative Time.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Which brings us to ...
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