On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast. Catherine Blyth

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СКАЧАТЬ this the oldest surviving calendar. Venerable obelisks still serve as shadow clocks in Egypt, a function some have performed since 3500 BC, but the circle of megaliths at Stonehenge is Britain’s oldest clock. Built around 3100 BC, its design ensured that their arches would frame sunset on 21 December, the northern winter solstice, and sunrise on 21 June, the high point of the northern summer. And those ancient worshippers had reason to celebrate it. Once our hunter-gatherer ancestors understood the meanderings of the moon, the sun and the seasons, they were armed with the co-ordinates that would enable them to stop living from hand to mouth and begin farming the land. As agriculture developed, communities grew until eventually there was not only enough surplus food but also enough time to spare people to foster new skills and interests. Society developed.

      Seasonal rhythms were central to life, as is reflected in the ceremonies of organized religion. Look past the burnt offerings and the vestments and you will find that the pulse behind the stories and traditions is agriculture’s calendar and the urge to control time, with festivals contrived to coax heaven into supplying timely sun and rain. Émile Durkheim, the forefather of sociology, identified this coercive property: ‘A calendar expresses the rhythm of the collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularities.’ If festivals paced time’s passage, with every culture offering sacrifices to encourage the New Year to be a kind one, the day’s staging posts were events: meal times, work times, sleep times, sun up, sun down, lengthening shadows and bells, just as the muezzin’s call to prayer sets the beat of a traditional Islamic day. Briefer intervals could be measured – a trained stargazer in ancient Babylon could tell time to within a quarter of an hour – but clocks were unnecessary. At such a gentle pace, who needs minutes?

      Horology, the art and science of measuring time, soon fascinated rulers, because whoever controlled time could control people. Dates and hours supplied tools for synchronizing actions, whether to wage wars or to co-ordinate workers. It is no accident that the greater the number of clocks in an environment, the swifter people will go, as sociologist Robert Levine discovered when investigating the pace of life around the world. No wonder every major civilization invested heavily in the study of time, often hoping to prise open a window onto the future. Chinese and Babylonian astronomers (who were also priests) used their observations to predict not only astral phenomena but events on earth – a covert means of telling kings what to do.

      A stroll through the history of clocks is like turning the pages of a flicker book of civilization’s greatest hits. Each occasion the timekeeper is reborn it is in a form that both mirrors and distorts its age. Shadow, sand, water, incense and candle clocks came early, but to trade event time for bossy, precise, hour-and-minute time, mechanical means were necessary.

      The first automated timepieces appeared in European monasteries in the thirteenth century; named after the Latin clocca, ‘bell’, these faceless, armless clocks struck the hour as religious houses always had. Otherwise they were the preserve of the wealthy. To encounter a clock was to learn that here lived somebody to be reckoned with, as did Elizabeth I’s visitors at Whitehall Palace, where they were greeted by a needlework map of Britain, a sundial shaped like a monkey and a wind-up clock of an ‘Ethiop riding upon a rhinocerous’.

      Clocks also supplied passports to power. In 1601, Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci presented the Wanli emperor with a chiming clock, hoping to gain admission to China’s capital city. This device, so pettable compared to the huge water-clock towers that then thumbed the kingdom, inspired what would become an imperial passion for collecting clocks.

      As navigation dissolved the oceans’ frontiers, a series of shipwrecks led Britain’s government to offer a prize to whoever found a means of tracking longitude. John Harrison, a carpenter from Yorkshire, devoted forty-three years to create a timepiece with sea legs steady enough to keep time, week after week, in heat, cold and tropical humidity on an ever-bobbing ship – saving lives, accelerating commerce, defeating the limits of space. Next, industrialization brought factory clocks and managers brandishing pocket watches, leading to the birth of a science called efficiency.

      After engineers parcelled up the land in railways, the need to co-ordinate timetables led London Time to be decreed the whole country’s in 1880 – the first national standard time in the world. Towns no longer had their own time, and the loss of these gentler rhythms was mourned by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles: ‘Tess … started on her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.’

      Once wristwatches became wardrobe staples, people were cuffed to time’s rule – an intrusion that was not always welcomed. In the 1950s Anirini, a Greek island, was so dull that clocks proved unnecessary, reported one traveller, describing how the suspected homicide of a husband, sent plunging down a well, was forgivingly ascribed to tedium. Locals bridled at neither the murderess nor the investigating police; however, the fat Yugoslav timepiece on an itinerant fisherman’s wrist horrified them.

      As time technology grew nimbler, so did temporal thinking. It could be on a galactic scale; Albert Einstein theorized that billion-year-old collisions between black holes would be detected in waves of energy that continue to ripple across the universe, a prediction finally confirmed in 2016. Einstein also claimed correctly that time slows if you move fast enough (accelerating clocks grow heavier). Put an atomic clock, which keeps time by means of caesium electrons, losing one second in thirty million years, on a GPS satellite, which orbits earth at 18,000 mph, and sure enough, it loses 38 microseconds a day, requiring special electronics to recalculate its positioning. Thanks to such awesome precision, we can build targeted missiles and little gadgets capable of traversing chasms of space, landing on speeding comets and burying their noses in faraway planets’ secrets.

      Computers and digital faces replaced the soothing flow of revolving arms with numbers, giving time a staccato beat – an apt prelude to the disruptions ahead, when smartphones would become our favourite means of telling time. Yet to some amazement, the watch is not dead. Luxury sales soar. The Rolex, Hublot or diving watch, equally true on the seabed or atop Everest, sits like a jewel on its owner’s wrist – perhaps, if he is a man, his only jewel. It is there less to indicate that its wearer is manacled to a schedule (even if this is how he is able to afford it) than to imply enduring success – the same message issued by Elizabeth I’s rhinoceros clock in Whitehall. Canny manufacturers market these beauties as heirlooms-in-waiting: a signal of your grip on time. This is in marked contrast to today’s other horological success story, Apple’s smartwatch, which does not passively purvey temporal information. No, it is a nagging device, buzzing like a wasp to alert its owner to an appointment or to that dire emergency, the arrival of another email – rupturing the user’s attention while ostensibly micromanaging her time.

      We have travelled far from event time, which patterned our forefathers’ days according to the occasions that mattered, to a strange new, non-event time, which continually interrupts our flow. The smartwatch reminds me of that disquieting truth: whoever controls time also controls people.

      Does this version of time work for you? Or does it make you its slave?

      2. Our fictional units of time

      In 1914, as the world geared up for the Great War, an inquisitive seven-year-old began dissecting her new favourite toy, an alarm clock. She wanted to see this peculiar thing, time. Seven alarm clocks died grisly deaths before her mother cottoned on to what was happening and gave her one device on which to experiment.

      Grace Brewster Murray Hopper never found what she was looking for. Instead she became a mathematician, joining the US Navy in the next world war to help devise a computer. When hostilities ended in 1945, the Navy said that at thirty-eight she was too old to join the regular force, so off she went to devise the first programming language using solely English words, flooring sceptics who imagined computers could only do arithmetic. The Navy soon took СКАЧАТЬ