Inventing Time
How our lives came to be run by the clock
“The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age.”
— Lewis Mumford, Technology Historian
In 1947, 101-year-old Confederate veteran Julius Howell gave an interview to the U.S. Library of Congress on his experiences in the American Civil War. It is a great primary source overall, but I want to focus on one off-hand comment Howell makes. While talking about marching around Petersburg, he says an aside that “we never counted distances or times in those days.” When Howell was growing up in rural Virginia in the 1850s, many people would neither have known nor cared what the exact time was.
To those of us living western lifestyles today, this is difficult to imagine. I have a clock beside my bed which is often the first thing I see when I wake up and the last thing I see before I go to sleep. I wear a watch on my wrist, have a clock in my car, carry a mobile phone which tells me the time, and can glance at the bottom corner of the computer screen to see the time as I type this sentence. I need to know the time to catch a train, go shopping when the stores are open, go to work, and make appointments. My leisure activities are time-bound as well, from meeting my friends…