Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

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СКАЧАТЬ a new time consciousness affected all who travelled: the concept of ‘punctuality’ was born anew.

      Passengers who prided themselves on the accuracy of their watches (and as the century went on, there were many more of these) were joined by an entirely new watch-owning class – railwaymen. Neither would be satisfied with what they saw as unnecessary wrinkles in precision. If railway station clocks were left unsynchronised, composite and comparable timetables between destination and arrival points would not only cause confusion and frustration, but would be increasingly impossible and dangerous to maintain. As railways filled the countryside, a driver’s watch at variance with another’s would almost certainly end in collision. And then, a year later, a solution was found, at least in Britain. For the first time, timekeeping achieved nationwide standardisation: the railways began to imprint their own clock upon the world.

      In November 1840 the Great Western Railway was the first to adopt the idea that time along its route should be the same no matter where a passenger alighted or departed. This task was made possible with the advent of the electric telegraph the year before, with time signals from Greenwich being sent directly along trackside wires. ‘Railway time’ thus aligned itself with ‘London time’, and by 1847 it was running on the North Western Railway (where its greatest champion was Henry Booth), the London and South Western, the Lancaster and Carlisle, South Eastern, Caledonian, the Midland and the East Lancashire lines.

      There were other maverick champions too. In 1842, Abraham Follett Osler, a glassmaker and meteorologist from Birmingham, believed so strongly in the establishment of standardised time beyond the railways that he took matters into his own hands. Having raised funds for the erection of a new clock outside the Birmingham Philosophical Institution, he proceeded one evening to change its time from local to London time (moving it forward 7 minutes and 15 seconds). People noticed, but they also admired the clock’s accuracy; within the course of a year, local churches and shopkeepers changed their time to match it.

      By mid-century, about 90 per cent of Britain’s railways were running on London time, although the regulation met a little local opposition. Many city officials objected to any interference from London, and showed their disapproval by maintaining clocks with two minute hands – the later one usually denoting their local, older time. In an article titled ‘Railway-time Aggression’, a correspondent in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal in 1851 offered comical disgust: ‘Time, our best and dearest possession, is in danger. [Inhabitants were] now obliged, in many of our British towns and villages, to bend before the will of a vapour, and to hasten on his pace in obedience to the laws of a railway company! Was ever tyranny more monstrous or more unbearable than this?’ The writer backs his disdain with many examples, including a dinner party and a wedding both ruined as a result of time discrepancies, before rallying the readership:

      Is it possible that this monster evil, with its insidious promises of good and its sure harvest of evil, will be tolerated by freeborn Englishmen? Surely not! Let us rather rally round Old Time with the determination to agitate, and, if needs be, to resist this arbitrary aggression. Let our rallying cry be ‘The Sun or the Railway!’ Englishmen! Beware of delay in opposing this dangerous innovation! No time is to be lost – ‘Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!’

      Railway time could kill you just by being there. In 1868, one Dr Alfred Haviland, an epidemiologist and author of the guide Scarborough as a Health Resort, published Hurried To Death: or, A Few Words of Advice on the Danger of Hurry and Excitement Especially Addressed to Railway Passengers, in which, in fairly breathless prose, he warned of the risks of over-studying a train timetable and running to catch a departure, and being overly concerned with the era’s new schedules. His evidence, which managed to be both conclusive and dubious, centred on research suggesting that those who ventured regularly on the Brighton to London line aged faster than those who didn’t.

      The new pressure of time was the cause of some amusement. In 1862, the Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, an indispensible guide to what to wear and how to comport oneself on the rails, and how to behave when going through a tunnel, contained a passage about the inexperienced traveller running to catch a train with time to spare:

      About five minutes before a train starts, a bell is rung as a signal to passengers to prepare for starting. Persons unaccustomed to travel by railway connect the ringing of the bell with the instant departure of the train, and it is most amusing to watch the novices running helter-skelter along the platform, tumbling over everything and everybody in their eagerness to catch the train which they believe is about to go without them.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ