Free The Tyranny of E-mail by John Freeman Page A

mundane symbol of modern man: timepieces.

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THE INVENTION OF NOW
    Had there been stretched across the Continent yesterday a line of clocks extending from the extreme eastern point of Maine to the extreme western position on the Pacific coast, and had each clock sounded an alarm at the hour noon, local time, there would have been a continuous ringing from the east to the west lasting for 3¼ hours. At noon today, there will undoubtedly be confusion.
    —The New York Times, 1883
    On November 18, 1883, one man stopped time in New York City for nearly four minutes. The fellow thumbing the watch springs to a halt was one James Hamblet, the general superintendent of the Time Telegraph Company and manager of the time service of Western Union. In this capacity, Hamblet was effectively Gotham’s archduke of time, a role he had earned through hard work and creativity. Hamblet had invented an electric clock that could chime in a remote location, a device of great use for railway stations, which were required to display the time. Hambletalso managed Western Union’s own finely calibrated clock in room 48 of its 195 Broadway office. On that day, the regulator, as it was called, kicked off the mammoth task of synchronizing railroad timetables—no small feat, since as late as 1882 American railroads had a blizzard of time standards and therefore possessed more than seventy different answers to one very simple question: What time is it?
    Hamblet’s was not as dangerous a juggling act as one might think. Even though early American rail lines were constructed to travel on a single track, a small glitch in scheduling would not send a huffing Yellowstone Park Line crashing into a Northern Pacific waiting at the station. Telegraphic control of train movements, which began around 1855, prevented such accidents. Before that, complicated timetables invented by the French engineer Charles Ybry kept the rails safe.
    Still, passengers and station agents constantly wrestled with a persistent irritation: railroad time was often slightly different from local time—even more so outside major cities. As a result, “any traveler… upon leaving home, loses all confidence in his watch and is in fact without any reliable time,” wrote Charles F. Dowd in 1869. If a passenger planned to travel from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., he would have an even more niggling problem: to keep up with local time, he would have to change his watch more than two hundred times along the way.
    In the middle of the nineteenth century, the converging needs of geophysics—for uniformity of observations—and railroads led to a syncopated, haphazard, but effective push to fix this situation. In January 1882, Professor Cleveland Abbey, at a meeting of the New-York Electrical Society, proposed three standard times: Philadelphia time for the Atlantic coast, Saint Louis time for the Mississippi Valley, and San Francisco time for the Pacific coast. In October 1882, the heads of all the major railroads met in Chicago, where they agreed to work together to create standardized time.
    A year later, at precisely 9 a.m. in New York, Hamblet stopped the regulator for 3 minutes and 58.33 seconds—so that he could standardize time to a reading taken from a nearby observatory—and then restarted the machine, creating a new 9 a.m. sharp. Three observatories—in Washington, D.C., Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Allegheny, Pennsylvania—then tested its accuracy by telegraph. Finally, at noon, a ball dropped from the top of the Western Union building, which triggered a telegram to be sent to the city’s more than two thousand jewelers, who, in addition to peddling diamond broaches and pearl chokers, sold time itself.
    It is here—at the jewelers’—that we get a fascinating windowinto the metaphysical vertigo that overcomes us when the spacetime continuum is disrupted, sped up, or stopped altogether. On a small scale, November 18, 1883, sounds like a Y2K of the nineteenth century.