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Timekeepers. Simon Garfield
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isbn 9781782113201
Автор произведения Simon Garfield
Издательство Ingram
Those who travelled often, on the other hand, would use the bell as a signal to stand ‘by the carriage door coolly surveying the panic-stricken multitude’.8
The final unifying stroke came in 1880, with the passage in parliament of the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act. It was now a public order offence to knowingly display the wrong time on municipal buildings. But beyond Great Britain, time ran on different tracks. France, a nation that had embraced the railways later than many of its European neighbours, found a way to adapt its traditionally perverse attitude to time to its new transport. While most stations adopted Paris time for their schedules and external clocks, clocks within station buildings consistently and deliberately ran five minutes early to ease the pressure on passengers who might arrive late (this lasted from about 1840 to 1880; regular passengers, of course, grew wise to the ruse and adjusted their own scheduling accordingly, a nice display of laissez-faire).
In Germany the railways seemed to shrink time, as if a magical invention. When the theologian David Friedrich Strauss travelled from Heidelberg to Mannheim in the late 1840s he marvelled at a journey that took ‘half an hour instead of five hours’. In 1850 the Ludwigs railroad company shrunk time even more, advertising a trip from Nuremberg to Fürth, travelling ‘one and a half hours in ten minutes’. In his History of the Hour, the German theologian Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum notices persistent contemporary references to the railways causing ‘the destruction of space and time’ and ‘the emancipation from nature’. As with Henry Booth in Liverpool, travellers cutting through mountains and spanning valleys estimated that the eradication of these obstacles practically doubled their lifespans. The imagination accelerated all possibilities.
The character of the nation, the volksgeist, determined that the trains not only consistently ran according to schedule but were shown to do so by station clocks synchronised from Berlin. But the acceptance of the transformation from ‘external’ local time to ‘internal’ railway time took more than fifty years. Germany was unified by railway time only in the 1890s, but it was political and military expediency, rather than a concern for the passenger, that forced the move. In 1891, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, who had employed the railways effectively in his military campaigns in France, spoke in the Reichstag of the need for one clock throughout the country. The railways facilitated the greatest single improvement the military had encountered in his lifetime – enabling him to amass 430,000 men in four weeks – but there was a problem to be overcome.
Gentlemen, in Germany we have five different time zones. In north Germany, including Saxony, we use Berlin time; in Bavaria, Munich time; in Würtemburg, Stuttgart time; in Baden, Karlsruhe time; and in the Rhenish Palatinate, Ludwigshafen time. All the inconveniences and disadvantages which we dread encountering on the French and Russian frontiers, we experience today in our own country. This is, I may say, a ruin which has been left standing, a relic of the time of German disruption – a ruin which, now that we have become an Empire, should be completely erased.’
And thus did Germany adopt the precision of Greenwich.9
But it was on the vast continent of North America that the issue of a standard time faced its greatest challenge. Even in the early 1870s, an American rail traveller would have to have faith indeed, for the station clocks offered 49 different times from east to west. It was noon in Chicago, but 12.31 in Pittsburgh. The issue assumed particular urgency after 1853, when irregular timekeeping caused several railway fatalities (it didn’t help that trains usually travelled in both directions on a single track).
A set of timekeeping instructions issued in August 1853 by W. Raymond Lee, the superintendent on the Boston and Providence Railroad, laid bare the complexities, and the propensity for human error. In part, it read like a Marx Brothers script: ‘Standard Time is two minutes later than Bond & Sons’ clock, No 17 Congress Street, Boston’ the first of these began. ‘The Ticket Clerk, Boston Station, and the Ticket Clerk, Providence Station, are charged with the duty of regulating Station Time. The former will daily compare it with Standard Time, and the latter will daily compare it with Conductor’s Time; and the agreement of any two Conductors upon a variation in Station Time shall justify him in changing it.’10
And so the call went out to an unlikely group of specialists. American astronomers had long argued that their observatory time was the most accurate available, and they were now required to set station clocks wherever possible (taking over from town clocks and jewellers’ windows as the custodians of reliability). Around 20 astronomical institutions administered time to the railways in the 1880s, with the US Naval Observatory taking the lead.
Apart from the astronomers, one figure stands out. A railway engineer named William F. Allen was permanent secretary of the General Time Convention, and had long seen the advantages of a universal time system. At a meeting in the spring of 1883 he had laid out two maps before the assembled officials that seemed to establish his case beyond doubt. One was a forest of colours showing almost fifty lines, as if scribbled by an angry child, and the other was a smooth display of four broad colour bars, running north to south, each fifteen degrees of longitude apart. Allen claimed that the new map carried all ‘the enlightenment we hope for in the future’.11 Allen was proposing a remarkable thing: that his continent’s timekeeping be based not on its national meridian, but on a meridian beyond its borders, and upon signals received by electric telegraph from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.12
In the summer of 1883, Allen sent maps and details of his proposals to 570 railway company managers, and gained approval from the vast majority; he then supplied them with ‘translation tables’, to convert local time to standard. And so the familiar era of public timekeeping began at noon on Sunday, 18 November 1883, and the 49 previous time zones were reduced to four. Observing the transition from the Western Union Building in New York City, Allen noted, ‘the bells of St Paul’s strike on the old time. Four minutes later, obedient to the electrical signal from The Naval Observatory . . . local time was abandoned, probably forever.’
As in Europe, the railways’ strictures gradually spread to the locale in which they operated, and adhesion to the timetable on the tracks spread to all aspects of daily life. But, as in Europe, not every city delighted in the imposition of uniformity. Pittsburgh banned standard time until 1887, while Augusta and Savannah resisted until 1888. In Ohio, members of the Bellaire school board voted to adopt standard time and were promptly arrested on the orders of the city council. Detroit protested louder than most: although strictly part of the Central time zone, the city maintained local time (28 minutes behind Standard Time) until 1900. Henry Ford, who trained as a watch repairer before he revolutionised the car business, made and sold a watch that told both standard and local time simultaneously, and both remained in use until 1918.13
Towards the end of 1883, the Indianapolis Centennial noted that in the ultimate quarrel between man and nature, man had finally and irrevocably pulled ahead: ‘The sun is no longer to boss the job . . . The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time.’ At the heart of the newspaper’s distaste for this new system lay the diminishing role of the church and its bells calling congregants to prayer (and in effect the whole God-given scheme of things). ‘The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange . . . People will have to marry by railroad time.’14 A reporter in Cincinnati observed that ‘the longer a man is a commuter the more he grows to be a living timetable’.
The word ‘commuter’ was brand new (one who ‘commuted’ or shortened their journey). But the notion of the railway timetable, novel at the launch of the Liverpool and Manchester line in 1830, was by now ingrained in the soul.15 The first international railway timetable conference took place in Cologne in February 1872. Representatives from Austria, France, Belgium and Switzerland joined delegates from a newly unified Germany. The debate was both a simple and a complicated one: how to coordinate trains running across international borders to facilitate smooth travelling for passengers