When my son rears in protest as we try to saddle him with our schedule, I worry that he is learning to see time as his enemy. Because clocks are not going anywhere, and thank goodness for that. This chapter explores why we invented time and how it reinvents us. To a surprising degree our life is shaped by something often hidden from us: the version of time that we carry around inside our head. There are persuasive arguments for seeing time as your friend.
1. How time changed the world
Time is confusing. It is invisible, unbiddable; we cannot touch, taste, see or smell it, although you would have to travel a long way – as far as the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon rainforest – to find anyone above the age of ten with their wits intact who might deny that it exists.
The Pirahã are not just foxed by time. They also have no concept of numbers. Show them five soya beans and two soya beans and they cannot count the difference. Time blindness is an extension of their number blindness. This is because what we are talking about, when we talk about time, is something by which to count life. Its many puzzles have bewitched astrophysicists and befuddled philosophers, but set aside the black holes and the sophistry and you could do worse than this explanation given in 1762 by Henry Home, an industrious farmer-judge, who served as mentor to Adam Smith and David Hume and as the midwife to Scotland’s Enlightenment: ‘A child perceives an interval, and that interval it learns to call time.’
The complication is that from a user’s point of view, time is actually two separate things: it is the dimension in which we exist, and an organizational device like a compass. The compass’s job is to help us to navigate the dimension: to orientate ourselves in space, to measure the duration of events, to co-ordinate actions, and to plot our next steps. Day to day, however, we tend to think of time as something else entirely: a resource, divided into days, hours, minutes, seconds – the stuff that we never have enough of.
If you can bring yourself to forget its dismaying habit of marching on, then time grows easier to admire. This utterly ingenious intellectual technology lets us impose order on the rolling hurry of succession that is existence, by subdividing experience into three categories – past, present and future. It is also elastic, spanning infinitesimally tiny intervals such as attoseconds (a quintillionth or billionth of a billionth of a second) and epic photonic journeys across space called light years (5,878,625,373,184 miles). Its applications are numberless.
Try to imagine life without atomic clocks.
take a ten-second pause: really picture that thought
Did you envisage a world without smartphones, satellites or the internet? Almost certainly there were no nuclear submarines. It would be a slower place by far.
This little thought experiment illustrates an odd thing that happens when we find new ways to measure time: we transform what we can do with it. It is what cosmologist Gerald Whitrow was getting at when he spoke of ‘the invention of time’. Clocks were not simple witnesses to humanity’s story but accelerants. Each technological leap in timekeeping sprang a change.
The earliest evidence that humanity looked to the sky in search of answers about time is a painting on the wall of a cave in Lascaux, France, dating to 15,000 BC. Twenty-nine black dots undulate like hoofprints beneath a stippled brown horse; they are thought to represent the cycle of the moon, making 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