Timekeepers. Simon Garfield
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Название: Timekeepers
Автор: Simon Garfield
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9781782113201
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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 and freight and an efficient service by the operators? And then how to advertise this service in a way that would encourage and simplify this procedure? One of the most important agreements was how the timetable would be represented visually: it was decided to use roman numerals based on the 12-hour format. The conferences increased in number and productivity each year: the founding members were soon joined by Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland and Portugal, and the standardisation of time from London ensured that passengers increasingly made the right connections. The meetings were held twice a year, for summer and winter timetables, until the First World War brought cooperation and, in many cases, cross-border travel to an end. (War undid much that was noble about the railways; their potential facilitated modern warfare. The Duke of Wellington would surely have recognised their worth, as of course did Mussolini.16)
It won’t be so long before the train shifts its symbolic status as a model of speed and alarm to a model of sedateness; we shall soon see the car overtake it as the epitome of speed and stress. But first let us travel back to other tracks and tempos, and to charming old Austria, where a man with crazy hair is about to conduct a nervous orchestra.
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1 A neat loop: Hachette’s founder, Louis Hachette, founded his publishing and part-work empire on train station bookstalls in the 1820s, in the same manner as W.H. Smith.
2 When a statue, bound for King’s Cross, was cast in 2015 to mark the 75th anniversary of Gresley’s death, there was some controversy in the railway and duck press over whether a mallard should appear at his feet. The duck appeared in the early designs, but in the end, it was decided against.
3 At that very moment, the world record set by a steam train was still 124.5 mph, recorded two years earlier on a run between Hamburg and Berlin. The passengers on board, jubilant in their achievement, included Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. Hitler would hear of the news directly from Joseph Goebbels, who had drawn up the passenger list. The achievement was a victory not just for German engineering, but for Nazi supremacy.
4 Seasonably unreliable canals, the other slow method of transport at the birth of the railways, were principally for freight.
5 Paraphrased translation from ‘Histoire d’un crime’, 1877.
6 The actual journey on the opening day, 15 September 1830, attended by the Duke of Wellington and other dignitaries, took a little longer, owing to the fatal accident involving William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool and a great local supporter of the new railway. A frail man who failed to gauge the time it would take for Rocket to travel up the track to where he was standing, he was struck by it as passengers milled around on the track and as the engines took on water midway in the journey. Oh, the symbolism of progress! At the time it was an easy mistake to make.
7 The disparity was evident northwards of London too: Leeds was 6 minutes and 10 seconds behind London; Carnforth was 11 minutes and 5 seconds behind; Barrow was 12 minutes and 54 seconds.
8 For some, the helter-skelter of railways represented merely one more unwelcome intrusion of the fast modern СКАЧАТЬ