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

Many New Yorkers who wandered into jewelry stores that day seemed to think that the hiccup in their clocks “would create a sensation, a stoppage of business, and some sort of disaster, the nature of which could not be exactly ascertained.” Storefronts did not flog duct tape or bottled water, but a similar letdown descended upon the befuddled when the fateful hour passed without catastrophe. “They were incredulous when informed that the change would probably be one which they would know nothing about at the time,” wrote a
New York Times
reporter in a story entitled “Time’s Backward Flight,” “and would not necessarily postpone the celebration of Evacuation Day for a week.” Shipmasters, arguably, faced a more practical problem: they would have to figure out how to coordinate their position in this new linked scheme when “sailing about out of the reach of time-balls.”
All Together Now
    The way Hamblet and company went about melding railroad times brings back a lost world, one that seems quaint in our age of atomic clocks and handheld satellite navigators—we who always know exactly where and when we are, even if the road runs out. November 18, 1883, also highlights a truth that undergirds the grid of technology upon which modern life depends: all major new technologies affect our sense of space and time, and any technology that alters these elements also alters communication. The faster we relay information and the more we share what goes on in our heads with others, the busierour society becomes—space that was once thought conquered, such as the vast stretches of the American West or the wide blue deeps of the oceans, reassert themselves into virtual spaces, which become crowded as people regroup, and what is shared within them approaches unmediated human thought.
    The state of frenzy in which we live now was a long way off in the nineteenth century. People lived under the same darkening sky, but they did not live simultaneously. This is an important distinction to contemplate today, when so much of what we do—and especially what we communicate to one another— depends upon simultaneity. We wouldn’t have a media age without it. Everything from watching a television show broadcast out of New York while sitting on a couch in Chicago to sending an e-mail from one computer to the next to coordinating travel plans on the Eurostar could not happen without an agreed-upon sense of what “now” means. We could not travel by airplane or perform scientific experiments or trade stocks online or even clock into and out of work without it. Scientific experiments were, of course, completed in the nineteenth century and earlier, but the lack of standardized time was a constant stumbling block. And the now that we live in today—the now that many of us experience most intimately through the daily onslaught of e-mail, which has quickly developed a culture and expectation of instant response—has important roots in, but is vastly different from, the now people the world over were trying to wrap their heads around in 1883.
    At the fin de siècle, people around the world—let alone in the next town over—did not occupy an agreed-upon sense of time and place. They lived on a multiplicity of slightly different schedules. The International Prime Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., in October 1884 set up a single prime meridian passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich(Greenwich Mean Time) and adopted a twenty-four-hour day. But to the great disappointment of Sandford Fleming, a Canadian inventor, builder, and railway engineer, the meeting did not succeed at establishing standardized time for all nations. England was ahead of the game: it had used a standardized time system, based on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), for the railroads since 1847. Most English clocks were synchronized to GMT during 1855. France and Spain did not follow until the early twentieth century.
    For most of the rest of the world,