“Keeping Time: Techno-politics and Technologies of Time in the 19th Century US Economy”

by

Richard Salamé

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Department of History at Brown University

Thesis Advisor: Professor Seth Rockman

April 8, 2016

Keeping Time: Techno-politics and Technologies of Time in the 19th Century US Economy

Richard Salamé

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my parents for supporting me in my education and for making all of this work possible. I would like to thank them and all the members of my family for their love and encouragement. I owe a debt of gratitude to Su’ad Philippe Gemayel Salame, and others, for inspiring me to the study of history and the attempt to better understand the past. Thanks to my friends for their emotional and intellectual support. Thanks especially Sophie Kasakove, who discussed the thesis with me throughout the process of its creation. Thanks to Professor Seth Rockman, for his invaluable edits, comments, and advice throughout the research and writing process. This thesis would not be what it is today without his guidance and mentorship. Thanks to Michael Umbricht, Curator of Ladd Observatory, for being generous with his time and his own research results as they pertain to the Rhode Island Electric Protective Co and the timekeeping system at Ladd Observatory in Providence. Thanks to Professor Ethan Pollock for his comments, critiques, and encouragement. Thanks to the students of HIST1992, who read and critiqued a draft of Chapter 1. Thanks to the librarians of the Rockefeller Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society for their help and flexibility with my research needs. Thanks to the Brown University Department of History and the Dean of the College for funding that went towards researching this thesis. A number of people directly and indirectly contributed to making this thesis immeasurably better than it could have been without them. I apologize to those I have not mentioned. The mistakes of this work are my own.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...... 5 Introduction ...... 9 Chapter 1: Bide Your Time ...... 29 Chapter 2: The Human System ...... 63 Chapter 3: No Laggards in the Stock Market ...... 91 Conclusion: Weighed, Counted, and Measured ...... 129 Bibliography ...... 136

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Introduction

“It is the object of this book to show how the cost of administration may be determined, both in gross and the remotest details, by such impersonal, invariable means that their record may be looked upon as being as nearly absolutely true as that of any other similarly extended series of observations.” —Henry Metcalfe, ordnance officer and organizational theorist (1885)1

“I think if it is done properly, [scientific management] ought to be installed in all the establishments of the Government. It cannot be done, however, by reading books on the subject. It is a matter which requires a great deal of expert knowledge.” —Congressional testimony of Brigadier General William Crozier, Chief of Ordnance, War Department (1914)2

Around 8 am, on August 12, 1853 two trains of the Providence & Worcester Railroad collided head-on on a single set of track near Valley Falls, RI, killing fourteen people and outraging locals.3 Government and company investigations were immediately launched and it came to light that not only was the south-moving train behind schedule, but the conductor’s watch was not accurate and had misled him as to the actual time. Had he known the true time, apparently, he would have known that he did not have the four minutes he thought he had to reach the next switch but only two before the oncoming train in the opposite direction reached the same switch. Some witnesses alleged that a train passenger had alerted the conductor to the

1 Henry Metcalfe, The Cost of Manufactures and the Administration of Workshops, Public and Private (J. Wiley & Sons, 1885), 17. 2 United States Congress House Committee on Labor, The Stop Watch and Bonus System in Government Work: Hearings Before the Committee on Labor, House of Representatives, Sixty-Third Congress, Second Session on H.R. 8662 (Arno Press, 1914), 81. 3 Providence Journal, “Another Frightful Railroad Accident,” Providence Journal, August 13, 1853. 10 fact that his watch was two minutes slow several minutes before the accident occurred. And he had done nothing to remedy the situation. The conductor resisted this accusation, saying that the

Providence ticket master (subsequently) found his watch to be only five seconds off from the station time at Providence. He conceded that he was running behind schedule, but said that he had every reason to think he would reach the next switch regardless. The Providence Journal, for its part, excoriated the company for allowing a conductor to use his own pocket watch at all, especially given that his salary of $30 per month did not enable him to buy or borrow (in point of fact, his watch was indeed borrowed) a high-quality timepiece.4 In the aftermath of the controversy, American railroads expanded the scope and detail of their written operating rules.5

Within weeks American railroad companies were issuing standard company timepieces and promulgating rules explicitly defining which clock would be the official arbiter of time for the company. This would persist throughout the century, both before and after the development of our current time zone system.

The operating manual of the Boston and Maine Railroad for 1872, for example, stated that, “Engineers and Conductors will compare their watches daily with the clock in the Passenger

Depot at Alton Bay, as that will be the standard time for running trains.”6 By 1886 the manual cited the then-recently created Eastern Standard Time as well as a telegraphic time distribution network with its own attendant protocols:

22. “At two minutes before nine A.M. (9.00 A.M.), week-days, the several lines of telegraph wires will be connected with the "Cambridge time wire," and the Cambridge clock will beat every two seconds, making a pause of four seconds just before the fifty-

4 Providence Journal, “The Railroad Calamity,” Providence Journal, August 15, 1853; Providence Journal, “The Railroad Calamity,” Providence Journal, August 18, 1853. 5 Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 27. 6 William Merritt, Superintendent, Regulations for the Movement and Management of Trains on the Boston and Maine Railroad (Boston: Rand, Avery & Co, 1872). 11

ninth (59th) minute, and a pause of twenty-five seconds before nine A.M. (9.00 A.M.), the first beat after this latter pause indicating nine o'clock A.M. precisely.” [emphasis in original]

23. “All operators are expected to be on hand at this time, with their relays well adjusted, to receive the standard time. Time will also be given at 8 P.M.”

24. “The clocks at all stations and the watches of all employees must conform to the standard, by which time all trains will be run. At stations not having the telegraph the Station Agent must obtain the time from Passenger-Train conductors. All other telegraph business must be dropped to attend to receiving time.”7

As these brief anecdotes help illuminate, the word ‘time’ encompasses two distinct concepts: duration (e.g. 15 seconds) and position (e.g. 8:59:00 pm) within an arbitrary and relative reference system.8 Measuring duration requires a physical phenomenon with a known and stable periodicity—the rate of rotation of the Earth, the rate of radioactive decay in an atom, the rate at which light traverses a given distance, the rate at which a pendulum swings or a spring unwinds, and so on. And we use the duration between one thing and another to position ourselves within a purely conventional system of notating time. In the case of the Providence &

Worcester collision the accident was caused by a thin margin of error in terms of the duration allowed each train to traverse that particular set of track and the conflicting information about their temporal positions that the operators had. What was demanded was that the positions be synchronized, which required the durations between time-points be fixed and stable as well.

In the nineteenth century United States a number of technological, scientific, social, political, and economic transformations altered almost all aspects of time and temporality: the measurement of duration; common wisdom about the relationship between duration and position; the uniformity of intervals of accounting for time; the perceived importance of

7 Jas. T. Furber, General Manager and William Merritt, Superintendent, Time-Table and Rules for the Movement and Management of Trains on the Boston and Maine Railroad (Boston: Rand Avery Supply Co., 1886). 8 A scientific account of time can be found in Norman F Ramsey, “Precise Measurement of Time,” American Scientist 76, no. 1 (1988). Ramsey uses are ‘interval’ and ‘date’ instead of ‘duration’ and ‘position.’ I have adopted a different terminology for clarity. 12 punctuality and time-thrift; the experience of repetitiveness and time pressure in the industrial workplace; the perception of synchronicity in political, economic, and social life; norms and expectations of discipline and obedience to particular forms of timekeeping; and the relationship between clock time and apparent solar time, with their respective units and protocols for demarking dates (positions).

Ideologies rewarding precision and quantification encouraged a popular demand for personally-owned clocks and watches, and bestowed esteem on public clock towers as civic monuments.9 In science and mechanics the measurement of duration became more exacting and lent the reference system it mapped greater epistemic authority. The spatial concentration of production in the multi-function industrial factory and the functional subdivision of production activities into multiple interdependent parts brought greater synchronization to the work routines of industrial workers.10 Mass media, including newspapers and advertising, standardized language and culture, giving rise to imagined national communities in the United States and elsewhere predicated on simultaneity and uniformity of experience across large populations of people.11

9 Alexis McCrossen, “The ‘Very Delicate Construction’ of Pocket Watches and Time Consciousness in the Nineteenth‐Century United States,” Winterthur Portfolio 44, no. 1 (March 2010): 1–30,; Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search For Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 42–43. 10 See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1995), 241 on temporal order being generated by the division of labor. A downstream production process cannot be performed unless the upstream processes have also been performed (except in cases of large inventories, which can be expensive). Gregory Clark, “Factory Discipline,” The Journal of Economic History 54, no. 1 (1994): 139–141. 11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006); Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). 13

Figure 1: Rates of Travel from New York City in 1800, 1830, and 1857. From Charles O. Paullin, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, ed. John K. Wright and Robert K. Nelson, Digital edition [2013] (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1932), plates 138A–C.

Major advances in transportation and communication technology accelerating towards

midcentury caused regional and interregional markets to synchronize economic activity across

increasingly large spatial areas.12 The standardization of railroad time (completed in 1883),13 and

the spread of electrical telegraphic technologies including stock tickers, time signals, and remote

detection systems helped create new experiences of simultaneity, new corporate structures, and

new markets.14

12 Richard B. DuBoff, “Business Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844-1860,” The Business History Review 54, no. 4 (1980): 459–79; Richard B. DuBoff, “The Telegraph and the Structure of Markets in the United States, 1845–1890,” Research in Economic History 8 (1983): 253–77; JoAnne Yates, “The Telegraph’s Effect on Nineteenth Century Markets and Firms,” Business and Economic History 15 (January 1986): 149–63. 13 The railroads were also trying to preempt government regulation of their industry by demonstrating that they could self-regulate. The first time zone in the world was adopted by the New England Association of Railroad Superintendents in October 1849. The time standard, which was intended to cover all railroads in New England, was declared to be two minutes behind the Boston meridian as determined by the clockmakers William Bond & Sons. William Bond & Sons were chosen because of their reputation for precise high quality chronometers, in other words pendulums and springs with stable periodicity. The 1849 time standard was not widely used, but the later nation-wide time zone scheme established by the railroads in 1883 did catch on. By the 1890s it had become the de facto time system for the United States. It finally became law in 1918. Records of the New England Association of Railroad Superintendents (Washington, DC: Gibson Brothers, 1910), 37; Carlene E. Stephens, “Partners in Time: William Bond & Son of Boston and the Harvard College Observatory,” Harvard Library Bulletin 35, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 351–84; McCrossen, Marking Modern Times, 113. 14 Jeremy Stein, “Reflections on Time, Time-Space Compression and Technology in the Nineteenth Century,” in TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality, ed. Jon May and N. J. Thrift (New York: Psychology 14

All these forms of temporal and spatial reorganization reflected and helped create new temporalities—ones in which homogeneity and standardization were closer to being realized than ever before, in which the dissociation of ‘true time’ from ‘solar time’ was becoming more complete, and in which control over timekeeping and pace-setting had been centralized.15 As

McCrossen has argued, “Ever increasing speeds—of mechanical operations and of the circulation of goods, capital, and people—necessitated ever closer attention to coordination, synrchonization, and precision in timekeeping… Although the importance of distance receded, that of duration only intensified.”16 These processes of centralization and standardization served to transform the cultural understanding of time itself—it could become a quantifiable object in a way that it wasn’t before. It could even, perhaps, become that specific kind of valuated object known as a commodity.

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The scholarly literature on time and temporality is voluminous and multifaceted.

Historical studies alone include theoretical discussions of modern (and pre- and post-modern) temporalities; histories of timekeeping technology and scientific perspectives on time; literary histories of the novel and the periodic genres of diary, newspaper, and serial; labor histories of work-time trends; and cliometric surveys of time allocation and distribution.17 The oldest and most well-established scholarship has dealt with the United States and Great Britain, written by

Press, 2001); McCrossen, Marking Modern Times; JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: JHU Press, 1993). 15 McCrossen, Marking Modern Times, 89ff. 16 Ibid., 15. 17 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Wiley, 1992); Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Bartky, Selling the True Time; Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); David Brody, “Time and Work during Early American Industrialism,” Labor History 30, no. 1 (January 1989): 5–46, doi:10.1080/00236568900890011; Christoph Hermann, Capitalism and the Political Economy of Work Time (Routledge, 2015). 15 historians who are to a greater or lesser extent influenced by Marx. Marx’s analysis of capitalism as a system of surplus value extraction and accumulation that functions based on the expropriation of surplus labor time from workers and E.P. Thompson’s seminal 1967 article describing the promotion and enforcement of time-discipline by elites during early industrial capitalism continue to provide important theoretical frameworks in this literature.18 Recent work focused on the colonial world has made important contributions to our understanding of mechanical clock time as a political and economic tool that can be, and has been, deployed as part of state and corporate projects of control.19 To their considerable credit, many scholars of colonial and post-colonial contexts (Mitchell, Scott, Ogle, Metcalf, Barak) share an integrative view of history that ignores some of the divisions operative within American historiography— such as those between business history, labor history, history of technology, economic history, history of accounting, and intellectual history.

Historiographically, this thesis revisits a very well-studied historical context. Hopefully it does so with a perspective that has been productively informed by the analytic perspectives of colonial and post-colonial history. That is to say, with a willingness to cross longstanding historiographical divisions within the literature on the nineteenth century US. This means looking at the installation of public clocks in the US by the dominant class as expressive of some

18 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 38 (December 1967): 56–97; David A. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850 (Oxford University Press, 1991); Mark Michael Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Univ of North Carolina Press, 1997); Brody, “Time and Work during Early American Industrialism”; Hermann, Capitalism and the Political Economy of Work Time; S. A. Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?: The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production,” Review of Radical Political Economics 6, no. 2 (July 1, 1974): 60–112, doi:10.1177/048661347400600206. 19 Thomas R. Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire,” Representations, no. 6 (1984): 37– 65; Sanjay Strivastava, Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School (New York: Routledge, 1998); On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Univ of California Press, 2013); Vanessa Ogle, “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s– 1940s,” The American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013): 1376–1402; Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015). 16 of the same impulses motivating British imperial authorities in India to erect clock towers in

Aligarh or Bombay.20 And using Walter Benjamin’s anti-modern Parisian clock shooters,

Bombay’s Crawford Market clock shooters, and Egyptian anti-colonial polemics against a Euro-

American culture of speed to help think through the power dynamics within which working class

New Englanders created strategies of counter-surveillance and alternative power structures.21

Looking at the nineteenth century US as a site within ‘global history,’ to use a technical term somewhat loosely, may yet bring fresh results about a much-studied area of the world and its history.

This thesis argues that one specific change in the way people in the United States thought about time over the course of the nineteenth century is its ‘object-ness.’ Something abstract and indeterminate was made into an object that could be weighed, measured, and counted upon.

Such an object could become a store of value, a source of value, or a proxy for value. And, moreover, the creation of such an object opened up time as a field of control. It allowed for redistributions of social, economic, and political power between people in ways that threatened some agglomerations of power and enabled new ones. The social world left in the wake of this transformation was perhaps not ‘more’ or ‘less’ ordered but certainly differently ordered than social and economic life in the eighteenth century had been. Time had become the predominant

20 The Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. 5, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1908), 218. Oldham, R.D. “On Time in India: a suggestion for its improvement.” In Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 49–55. Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1900. Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (New York: Oxford UP, 1997). Ritika Prasad, “‘Time- Sense’: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (2012). Masselos, Jim. “Bombay Time.” In Intersections: Socio-Cultural Trends in Maharashtra, edited by Meeri Kosambi, 161–183. New Delhi: Orient Longman Limited, 2000. 21 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, by Walter Benjamin, 253–65, edited by Hannah Arendt, (New York: Harcourt, 1968); Times of India, “Shooting at the Market Clock,” March 15, 1898, www.proquest.com; On Barak, On Time, 145–150.

17 way of representing and remunerating labor value. Work measured in units of time had become the dominant medium of distributing access to resources within the economic system. Time- sensitive information technologies and business protocols imparted increasing exchange value on increasingly minute durations of time. And the work lives of many people in a variety of occupational roles were becoming subject to increased surveillance and observation through the mapping of people’s activities onto grids of mechanical clock time.

This thesis is an attempt to tell a history of the “techno-politics” of time and timekeeping in the nineteenth century northeastern United States. Techno-politics is a concept borrowed from the work of political scientist Timothy Mitchell. It is a theory of the politics of expert knowledge that puts forward the hypothesis that experts are inclined to constantly increase the domain of their expertise. As they colonize areas of knowledge they transform political and normative questions into supposedly technical and descriptive questions. The expansion of techno-politics in a historical context is the expansion of the power of a set of managerial elites who are able to redefine questions such as the uses of public space, or the means of distributing a resource, as technical problems whose resolution is the exclusive monopoly of the holders of expert knowledge. As Mitchell writes, under techno-politics “democratic struggles become a battle over the distribution of issues, attempting to establish as matters of public concern questions that others claim as private.”22 In other words, the basic problem of politics becomes one of setting boundaries around what counts as politics in the first place—and democratic politics becomes about enlarging that field.

Techno-politics not only claims domains of knowledge for experts but also transforms the nature of the knowledge itself in doing so. It relies on an objectification of social phenomena such that they can become subject to distant viewing and theoretical schematization. For example, to

22 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), 9. 18 create an expertise in questions of production, distribution, and consumption of resources requires that we take the open and non-bounded universe of information and set off parts of it as a closed and delimited system called ‘the economy.’23 This analytic tool, ‘the economy,’ constitutes a theoretical object. The observer, using expert knowledge of the rules that govern the behavior of the object, can analytically manipulate it, model its behavior, project its behavior into the future, and alter its boundary lines from a position ‘outside’ it.

Expert knowledge, as James C. Scott observes, is knowledge structured so as to be transparent and legible to the expert observer. It organizes information in such a way that all

‘relevant’ factors can be taken into account by a single viewer, giving this person a bird’s eye (or

God’s eye) view. As he and other scholars have pointed out, this legibility serves the synoptic gaze of centralized authority.24 Actors with the organizational, technological, and financial means to engage in surveillance, coupled with the political or economic incentives to do so, are the prime beneficiaries of the objectification of parts of the social world. Therefore, Scott writes, the creation of new branches of scientific knowledge, where once there was vernacular practice, is

“part of a political struggle for institutional hegemony by experts.”25

23 As an object of expert knowledge, ‘the economy’ has recently been argued to be an artefact of the twentieth century. The macroeconomic tradition initiated by the British colonial administrator and economist John Maynard Keynes is believed to be especially influential in this respect. See Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), introduction; Timothy Shenk, “Apostles of Growth,” The Nation, November 5, 2014, http://www.thenation.com/article/188369/apostles-growth; On the question of the extent to which Keynes thought his mathematical models gave him the ability to understand economic life and even control it for the good, see Roger Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman, Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011); An early and influential milestone in the theoretical opposition to “the economy” as a closed information system is F.A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–30. 24 For an excellent discussion of how the scientific gaze saw work processes at the turn of the century, see Sharon Corwin, “Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor,” Representations 84, no. 1 (2003): 139–65. 25 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998), 311; James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton University Press, 2012). 19

The history of the objectification of time, the topic of this thesis, allows us to explore these dynamics and assess how timekeeping fits into the story of changing landscapes of surveillance, control, and authority in the nineteenth century. These transformations are addressed at a variety of levels from the material and literal to the ideological and theoretical.

This thesis addresses three sites for the development and articulation of the objectification of time: the textile factory, the intra-urban telegraph system, and the stock ticker. These cases indicate broad and varied institutional re-alignments to respond to and harness an object representation of time. They show various institutions from the private firm to the financial exchange taking steps to control or administer time, and to promote its efficiency in production and exchange processes.

But why the northeastern United States, and what does that term denote in this context?

In this thesis it roughly equates to New England and New York. The urban core stretching from

Boston, Lowell, and Worcester, through Fall River, Providence, New London, New Haven, and

New York City forms the center of the region under study. This region was the first to experience both industrialization and urbanization and remained the center of gravity for the industrial and urban United States for the duration of the nineteenth century, even as industrial technologies and modes of production moved westward to places like Buffalo and Cleveland.

The northeast urban corridor provides a privileged site to study developments in the figuration of time in the nineteenth century. Most of the technologies and institutional adaptations that altered the way time was handled in production, distribution, and exchange were developed by residents of the northeast and found their earliest implementation there. (The grain elevators of Chicago are the most significant exception to that rule.) The northeast also is arguably the most controlled site for investigation in this time period. It was already settled by

Europeans by 1800 and included most of the densest, most urban areas in the US. It was not 20

significantly damaged by the US Civil War, it was not part of the constantly moving frontier zone

of European colonization during this time period, and it had the longest history with non-

agricultural wage labor. Of all the regions of the US, the northeast comes closest to being one

where transformations in the technological and administrative organization of wage work and

consumption can be attributed to endogenous and ongoing developments during the nineteenth

century.

Histories of resistance to techno-political ideologies and institutions form an indispensable

part of the history of techno-politics. Efforts to resist time standardization and the imposition of

modern Western models of time thrift and time organization have long interested scholars

because they provide important confirmation that contemporaries also saw time reform as

Figure 2 Geographic distribution of spindles for cotton spinning 1810, 1840, 1880. From Charles O. Paullin, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, ed. John K. Wright and Robert K. Nelson, Digital edition [2013] (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1932), plates 136A–C.

political, and as symbolic of and expressive of power. Struggle and conflict are also laced through

what follows in this thesis. In and around the factory workers used their own timepieces to

engage in counter-surveillance against management and to contest capital’s monopoly on 21 timekeeping. In the financial marketplace people of small-means used the telegraphic printer to access, albeit indirectly, the closed system of synchronous financial information transfer. But despite their importance, the voices of those who opposed time reform can appear faint at times, and more archival work is needed to recover their testimonies in the historical record. Further research must also expand the geographic breadth of techno-political of inquiry, exploring the

United States Southeast, West, and Midwest. Finally the surveillance of domestic workers and government workers remains understudied relative to the surveillance of industrial workers and calls for more scholarly attention as well.

This thesis presents a ‘pre-history,’ as it were, of the techno-politics of time in the northeastern US. Using a variety of names—managerial capitalism, corporatism, Taylorism,

Fordism, etc.—the presence of a set of phenomena that I would call techno-politics is widely agreed upon in scholarly and popular understandings of the early- to mid-twentieth century US economy. One of the purposes of this thesis, then, is to extend our thinking on techno-political structures backwards in time into the nineteenth century and to search for their first flowerings.

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At the start of the twentieth century in the United States a full-fledged techno-politics of time was in existence. The occupation of “efficiency engineer” had been conjured into existence to describe a new class of management experts who deployed stopwatches, long-exposure photographs, and early motion-picture technology to quantify the speed and vector of workers’ motions through space and time. There were conferences, trade journal articles, and widely-read manuals dedicated to so-called “scientific management.”26 Early “experiments” in improving

26 Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Bricklaying System (M.C. Clark publishing Company, 1909); Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Robert Thurston Kent, Motion Study: A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman (D. Van Nostrand company, 1921); Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915); Jules Amar, The Human Motor: Or, The Scientific Foundations of Labour and 22 worker efficiency dated back to 1880.27 More technologically elaborate “experiments” involving tying light bulbs to workers’ hands and heads and then photographing them in dimly-lit rooms with gridded walls were conducted as early as 1913 in Providence, RI, at the New England Butt

Company.28 The management system was investigated by Congress in 1911, 1912, and 1914 and a bill to ban stopwatches from government arsenals made it to committee before stalling in

1914.29 While labor unrest ultimately defeated “scientific management,” industrial relations, business administration, and human resources would continue to develop as fields of study and occupations. A new class of people established themselves as experts on the topic of human labor and legitimated themselves through trade journals and business schools. Their influence over the political economic questions of “who worked where, on what terms, and to whose benefit” constituted a techno-politics.30 As the questioning of Brigadier General William Crozier (see epigraph to this chapter), commanding officer of the scientifically managed Watertown Arsenal, highlights, in 1914 government analyses of labor required the numeracy to make sense of relationships between minutes per labor task, units produced per minute, pay per minute, pay per unit of output, and percentages of labor time spent in motion or at rest. For what must have been several hours, during the hearing the committee members went back and forth with

Industry (Routledge, 1920); Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Addresses and Discussions at the Conference on Scientific Management Held October 12, 13, 14, Nineteen Hundred and Eleven (Amos Tuck school of administration and finance, Dartmouth college, 1912); A. Hamilton Church, “The Meaning of Scientific Management,” The Engineering Magazine 41, no. 1 (April 1911): 97–101. 27 Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 104–105. 28 Corwin, “Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor” fn 21. 29 W.B. Wilson, Investigation of Taylor System of Shop Management (Washington, DC, 1911); United States Congress House Committee on Labor, The Stop Watch and Bonus System in Government Work: Hearings Before the Committee on Labor, House of Representatives, Sixty-Third Congress, Second Session on H.R. 8662 (Arno Press, 1914). 30 I am adopting the definition of political economy laid out in Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (JHU Press, 2010), 5. 23

Crozier, trying to make sense of the calculations necessary to measure labor time and getting bogged down in arithmetical disagreements.31

A techno-politics of something as ethereal as time required, for its emergence, an object to which expertise could be applied in a mechanical, quantitative fashion. The transformation of labor into a time-object performed this function extremely well. The sale of labor on the market required that labor and money each be given a quantum, or discrete unit basis, to allow for the possibility of establishing numerical equivalences between ‘amounts’ of labor and money.

Conventionalized units of duration—days, hours, minutes, and seconds—were just one way that human labor could be mapped onto something (putatively) quantitative. Time was useful for this because it wasn’t complicated by divisions of labor and distributions of tasks that made measuring output potentially fraught over the long run. Using time in this way did much to change time itself into the sort of object that it was rendered as—something that unfolded in units of clock time. Since the objectification of time was worked out in large part through the commodification of labor time, we ought to look to the process of rendering labor as time and that time as a commodity if we are to try to understand how this opened up space for expertise.

The ways in which human activity can be figured as a commodity (termed labor) have long fascinated scholars, in part because labor is as counterintuitive as it is essential to political economy. In descriptive terms, commodities have traditionally been understood by political economists to behave in accordance with certain ‘laws.’ According to Polanyi’s famous formulation, the state of being subject to a “supply-and-demand mechanism” constitutes the definition of commodity status.32 And for Marx a commodity is “an object outside us” that “by its

31 United States Congress House Committee on Labor, The Stop Watch and Bonus System in Government Work, 52–117. 32 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 1944). 75. 24 properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.”33 Yet as Robert Steinfeld shows in his historical study of the structure of the legal relationship between employer and employed in

England and America, even an individualistic market society does not necessarily entail any particular legal construction or another between the worker and the one who ‘buys’ his labor.34

In other words, specific legal and institutional mechanisms need to intervene to turn human activity into a commodity.

The canonical political economists of eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain understood labor to be a series of motions and processes whereby the human body acts on objects outside itself, investing those objects with added value. Under the doctrine known as the

‘labor theory of value,’ the material output of the production process physically represented the essentially intangible force that is human labor.35 The commodity was a congealment of the labor inputted in its production.

Marx’s contribution to the debate came from his observation that the exchange value of labor—what the laborer is able to demand in exchange for his labor on the market—is less than the use value of labor since it is possible to satisfy the minimum requirements for the worker’s survival with less than 24 hours of labor a day. In other words, the laborer can be made to add to the production process more use value than he or she receives in wages (exchange value) in inverse proportion to the amount of daily time he or she needs to spend ensuring his or her basic survival; and in direct proportion to the politically-determined length of the working day.36 The

33 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 34 Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (UNC Press Books, 1991), the specific thought referenced above begins on p 5. 35 See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Project Gutenberg, 2013), www.gutenberg.org, chapter 5; and John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Project Gutenberg, 2014), www.gutenberg.org, chapter 5. 36 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1:135–136. So, for example, if a laborer needed 24 hours of labor to provide for his or her survival he or she would be unable to offer any surplus value to the 25 implication of this insight (which may not have been as innovative as has traditionally been thought37) is a representation of labor as a duration of time rather than a material output.

Modern scholars with more anthropological bents have written about the ways in which economic relations are embedded in non-economic social relations. For them, creating the commodity form of labor required the disembedding of markets from society, and the removal of individuals from the social networks that contextualized their identities.38 Feminist scholars have also questioned the traditionally-drawn boundaries between economic and non-economic relations (and economic and non-economic activities) as they pertain to unpaid domestic work and other forms of non-wage labor.39

Richard Biernacki argues that Britain and Germany each translated labor into commodity form differently, with the former using material products and the latter using duration as their dominant way of culturally and discursively representing labor.40 This is far from a theoretical nicety; Biernacki argues that “divergent assumptions led to differences in the definition of wages, the calculation of costs, rights of employment, disciplinary fines, and the

purchaser of labor power. But if the laborer only needed 4 hours of labor per day to provide for his or her survival, he or she could theoretically contribute between 0 and 20 hours of surplus value per day. Exchange value and use value can be separated as theoretical partitions of time. The cost that labor can command in the market is a function of the cost of survival for the laborer, but the length of the actual working day is determined by the power relations between buyers and sellers of labor in a given labor market. The buyer of labor expropriates labor value from the worker when he or she is able to establish a working day longer than that which is necessary for the laborer to produce the means for his or her survival. The value produced in that surplus of time worked beyond what is ‘socially necessary’ is profit to the capitalist, because the exchange value of labor (the wage) remains fixed to the cost of social reproduction (survival). 37 Richard Biernacki argues that Marx’s conception of labor time hews close to both the economic thought and the processes of production current in Germany at the time of his writing. See Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 279ff. 38 Polanyi, The Great Transformation; David Graeber, Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2014). 39 Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (Oxford University Press, 1994), Introduction. 40 Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914, 383–385. 26 design of factory buildings.”41 These “ideologies of labor” are inextricably tied up in the materiality of the production process, from the instruments of accounting to the layout of the factory floor. They are both representations and actual procedures, and human experiences of the production process were simultaneously mediated through both symbolic discourses of labor as well as praxis-as-communication.

The challenge Biernacki serves up to the historian is formidable. He writes, “To speak of

“the rise of market culture” or the commodification of “labor” without contextualizing their definitions falsely objectifies our terms of understanding.”42 In chapter one I present what I believe constitutes evidence that labor time was a commodity on both of Biernacki’s registers— signification and procedure—in the nineteenth century northeastern US textile manufacturing plant. Labor was represented and signified by measures of duration corresponding to the regular, uniform time measurement enabled, encouraged, and propagated by clocks. For Biernacki, it was the translation of labor into the two media of time and material that allowed labor to become a commodity. But, as we shall see, it is equally true that it was also the translation of time into the medium of labor that allowed something so intangible as time to become a commodity.

The objectification of time is too basic of a change in the way that time was figured discursively and deployed politically to be confined to just one institutional context. At the same time that the factory was being brought under new mechanical and time-based systems of control and surveillance, so, too, was the urban environment writ large. This is the subject of Chapter

Two. Starting in the 1840s a small number of upper class educated men were able to harness the rhetoric of physics and biology to advocate for the use of telegraph networks for municipal organization. These telegraph networks were instrumental in professionalizing fire and police

41 Ibid., 12. 42 Ibid., 2. 27 departments, in spreading domestic alarm security technology, in protecting bank property, in speeding the communication of information, in better monitoring workers, and in synchronizing clocks. In equal measure as they made US cities more rational, more orderly places they also expanded the reach of monitoring and control technologies and centralized information flows and authorities (like police authority, or timekeeping authority). Synchronicity—and the ability to respond punitively to violations of synchronicity—was expanded into both civic and domestic spaces in this way. The techno-politics of time expanded to fill the spaces created for it with expertise. As elites changed the cultural, social, and institutional arrangements surrounding time, they opened up room for themselves to extend their power and project a world in their own image onto more and more diverse sites of living.

And, thirdly and finally, the objectification of time had implications at yet a larger and altogether less definable spatial scale: the national (and international) financial marketplace. The spread of railroads and telegraph wires across the US in the mid-nineteenth century reduced the travel times both of information and of physical commodities. It expanded each producer’s geographic reach at the same time that it exposed them to more competition. Price information spread farther and faster—leading to price convergence across geographically separated markets.43 Theorist James Carey provocatively argues that the telegraph and the watch had analogous political and economic effects, distinguished from each other mainly by scale: “As the watch coordinated the industrial factory; the telegraph via the grid of time coordinated the industrial nation.”44

43 Christopher Hoag, “The Atlantic Telegraph Cable and Capital Market Information Flows,” The Journal of Economic History 66, no. 2 (June 1, 2006): 342–53; DuBoff, “Business Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844-1860”; DuBoff, “The Telegraph and the Structure of Markets in the United States, 1845–1890.” 44 James W Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, by James W Carey (Taylor & Francis, 1989), 21. 28

Chapter Three details the history of the telegraphic stock ticker and the company that monopolized it in its early years. The spread of the stock ticker, along with private telegraph lines between brokerage firms and financial exchanges, evidences the intensity of the competition for fast information in the late-nineteenth century. As methods of communication sped up a general arms-race ensued with economic actors trying to make sure they received and communicated information at least as fast as if not faster than competitors. Never before had such small differences in time position had such persistent resounding consequence. Small amounts of duration were now assigned a value, and both the value and the quantified duration were perceived as real.

+ + +

If the connection between ‘modernity’ and ‘discipline’ has now become a commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, there is still a tendency to take for granted that

‘industrialization’ is an adequate explanation for the twin developments of a modern and disciplinary society. The time-discipline of the factory, the synchronization demands of industrial production, and the rise of Classical Liberal thought among the intellectual classes are sometimes taken to be sufficient in setting the nineteenth-century stage for the Anglo-American archpriests of twentieth century capitalism—F.W. Taylor, Henry Ford, John Maynard Keynes—and their various ‘-isms.’ This thesis attempts to add to our understanding of the nineteenth century conditions, especially with regards to the measurement, recording, and distribution of time information, that make up this ‘pre-history.’ A large number of technologies, practices, institutions, people, and decisions cumulatively created an objectification of time in the nineteenth century, and this process was as contingent as it was monumental. This thesis hopefully helps us better understand this nineteenth century history. And hopefully it avoids engaging in a teleology of its own. 29

Chapter 1: Bide Your Time

I am a Ten hour workingman! I glory in the name; Though now by 'all day' minions hissed, And covered o'er with shame: It is a spell of light and power— The watchword of the free:— Who spurns it in his trial hour, A craven soul is he. I am a Ten hour workingman! Then urge me not to pause: For joyfully do I enlist In FREEDOM's sacred cause: A nobler strife the world ne'er saw. Th' enslaved to disenthral; I am a soldier for the war, Whatever may befall! —“Song of the Ten Hour Workingman” (1844)1

This chapter is hardly the first historical account of labor time and industrial discipline in the nineteenth century. Nor is it even the first account that focuses on northeastern US textile mills.2 But the end toward which the analysis is driving is perhaps somewhat distinct: the point in this chapter is to describe objectified labor time as a development that laid the ground for expertise. For that reason it matters not just that labor time was an object but what that

1 “Song of the Ten Hour Workingman: From Garrison’s ‘Song of the Abolitionist,’” The Mechanic, May 4, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm. 2 See, for instance, E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 38 (December 1967): 56–97; David A. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850 (Oxford University Press, 1991); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 1944); Christoph Hermann, Capitalism and the Political Economy of Work Time (Routledge, 2015); Gary Kulik, “Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island,” Radical History Review 17 (1978). 30 assignation means, and how that assignation affected material realities of the production process.

The objectification of labor time made something ethereal and inchoate into a cost of production, a material input in the manufacturing process, and a fundamental dimension of cost- accounting in ways that it was not before. It made time, in other words, a problem of management. And what happened to labor in the transformation from task or output to duration and position, had important implications for the larger society in which economic relations were, and necessarily always are, embedded.

After historiographical remarks, the chapter begins with a brief description of how nineteenth century observers talked about labor, which enables us to better interpret the evidence of business records that then follows. The business records are analyzed with an eye towards what they can tell us about the way time was understood and deployed in the textile industry.

Particular importance is given to the almost silent shift from day-units to hour-units in the

Blackstone Manufacturing Company’s labor accounting in 1874. How could a firm that had been paying wages a certain way for 40 years change it overnight without any pushback? The likely answer, we shall see, is that the ideologies of labor required for an hourly pay system were already in place in 1874. We move from accounting to time surveillance systems and technologies, ending with a discussion of subaltern responses to those systems. Throughout we drive towards the conclusion that labor time was an object in this nineteenth century context, foreshadowing the maturation of a turn of the century techno-politics.

+ + +

The construction of the first factory in the United States was completed in Pawtucket,

Rhode Island in 1793. Over the course of the following century massive changes in the economic lives of New Englanders would occur. By the time of the 1900 census New England contained 31

$1.59 billion3 in capital and almost 950,000 people were employed in the region’s manufacturing sector.4 The overwhelmingly rural and agricultural New England of the late-eighteenth century gave way to an industrial and urbanized society in which it became increasingly common for people to work for wages in large establishments employing hundreds, or even thousands, of people.

Descriptions of preindustrial or pre-modern temporalities that existed before these transformations are controversial, even if we limit ourselves narrowly to the question of how time was used to pace or conceptually frame human tasks and activities.5 E.P. Thompson argues that preindustrial societies used a task-oriented time notation in which time was measured by the duration or periodicity of human activities. Furthermore, he argues that a work-life temporal boundary was nonexistent since all time was understood relative to human activity.6 Task- oriented time notation would in turn lend itself to a view of work as a series of needful tasks to be accomplished in a unified field of time. There would be no need to fragment the unified field of time into ‘work time’ and ‘free time’ since time was not available as a metric against which to measure work. Or, in other words, work was not expressed in units of time. While accepting much of Thompson’s argument on this point, Mark Smith has argued that agricultural work in the Old South already featured ideas like time thrift and the idea of pacing labor against time,

3 All dollar amounts are nominal values, unadjusted for inflation. 4 Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900. Manufactures Part 1, United States by Industries., vol. 7 (Washington, DC: United States Census Office, 1902) Table 6. 5 Another major issue in the economic history of preindustrial temporalities concerns the amount of time spent working per day, week, or year. See Hans-Joachim Voth, Time and Work in England 1750-1830 (Clarendon Press, 2000); Hans-Joachim Voth, “Time and Work in Eighteenth-Century London,” The Journal of Economic History 58, no. 01 (1998): 29–58; Gregory Clark, “Factory Discipline,” The Journal of Economic History 54, no. 1 (March 1, 1994): 128–63; Hermann, Capitalism and the Political Economy of Work Time; Jan de Vries, “"Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe,” in Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), 85– 133. A major conceptual flaw in these studies becomes readily apparent if one accepts the idea of a weak or nonexistent demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life’ in preindustrial societies. 6 Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.”, 60. 32 even if that time was not represented on a clock: “Men and women… knew too well the need for the best use of time against nature’s seasonal push… Once people began to pace themselves against natural time, the tendency to race against clock time was a logical step requiring no great conceptual or intellectual revolution.”7 Voth, interested in hard data and skeptical of written accounts, has challenged the idea that Thompson and Smith could know very much about preindustrial work time patterns at all. “Lack of representativeness” in sources, he says, “is only matched by the difficulty with which these sources can be interpreted.”8

Adding to the confusion is the fact that the work time labor campaigns that have served as key evidence of a new ‘industrial’ time regime did not always coincide with the advent of

‘industrial’ modes of production.9 The country’s first collective demand for a 10-hour working day was issued by Philadelphia’s journeymen carpenters in 1791, when the trade was still structured by craft and artisanal traditions (more on this below).10 Gregory Clark has argued, contra Marxist orthodoxy, that factory discipline (of which time discipline was a part), was not a requirement of most nineteenth century technologies.11

Nonetheless, the mainstream view remains that nineteenth century people, both in the

‘West’ and elsewhere, generally experienced time differently than had their eighteenth-century forbearers.12 For our purposes here, what matters in particular is the how changing conditions of work changed the meaning of time for economic actors and how the reverse happened as well.

7 Mark Michael Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Univ of North Carolina Press, 1997). 8 Voth, Time and Work in England 1750-1830, 16. 9 Thompson is a ready example of a scholar who uses work time campaigns as evidence of an industrial- capitalism time regime. See also Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 239–249; and Kulik, “Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island,” 5, 14, 28. 10 David Brody, “Time and Work during Early American Industrialism,” Labor History 30, no. 1 (January 1989): 5–46, doi:10.1080/00236568900890011. 39. 11 Clark, “Factory Discipline,” 161. 12 Some of the most influential recent studies on this topic are: Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015); Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times: A History of 33

It can be definitively said that whatever time-measurement infrastructure existed before the birth of the industrial towns of the nineteenth century, that infrastructure was greatly expanded during the course of industrialization. The landscape was filled with factory bells and public clock towers, and workplaces contained watchmen’s time-detectors and workmen’s time-recorders that allowed management to track employees in space and time more precisely and more impersonally. These machines went hand in hand with a new protocol-based management culture that sought to minimize individual discretion and maximize the use of impersonal and seemingly neutral mechanisms of recording and communicating information.13

Not only do we know that clock towers and time recorders were being installed, but workers themselves testified to a new regime of objectified labor time. Their writings, petitions, and testimonies from as early as the 1820s demonstrate that they at least perceived their employment engagements as agreements over the ownership and dispensation of time.

One of the most obvious and important ways in which labor was read through temporal frameworks was the battle over the length of the working day, as measured in units of mechanical clock time. From the beginning of New England industrialization, labor activism focused on the issue of the length of the working day more than any other issue. In 1824 the first strike in the history of the US textile industry happened in Pawtucket, Rhode Island because the mill owners in the village collectively agreed to extend labor time by one hour per day, to be accomplished via a reduction in the amount of time allowed for meals.14 Worker-run publications such as the

Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2013); Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford University Press, 2000); Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Univ of California Press, 2013). 13 JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (JHU Press, 1993), 1–11; Alfred D. Chandler Jr, The Visible Hand (Harvard University Press, 1977), introduction. 14 Gary Kulik, “The Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in America: Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 1672- 1829” (Doctoral Dissertation, Brown University, 1981), 360ff. 34

Voice of Industry (1845–1848), the Lowell Offering (1840–1845), The Mechanic (1844–1845) and many others were mainly focused on the ten-hour campaign, which sought to create a statutory limit to the length of the working day. These newspapers, which appeared in many New England mill towns, were written by workers and intended to be read by workers and other members of the community. Most of the articles were published anonymously or pseudonymously, excepting contributions from local pastors. Most were skewed towards adult laborers, particularly men and particularly higher-skilled workers,15 but they nonetheless provide important evidence of New

England workers’ reading and writing at this time. It is significant that the inaugural issue of The

Mechanic, for instance, carried a message from the editors that they had taken up the task of making a newspaper, “for the purpose of speaking to the public in relation to the reduction of the hours of labor.”16 The paper would dedicate almost every issue of its existence to the promotion and propagandizing of the ten-hour cause, complete with poems and songs to be sung in honor of the “ten hour man,” the mechanic who refused to work over ten hours a day.17

The nineteenth century struggle over the length of the working day is generally regarded as a sign of labor’s at least partial capitulation to capital. Within three generations of the imposition of mechanical time as the standard of measurement for human labor, Thompson famously argued, workers “had accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight

15 Sarah Bagley was fired from the Voice of Industry in June 1846. She apparently believed that the reason for her termination was that the new editor of the paper did not want a “female department” and thought it unseemly. “Sarah George Bagley,” accessed September 7, 2015, http://library.uml.edu/clh/Bag.htm; Murphy argues that the focus on hours rather than on wages also had a gender bias: men were more likely to hold positions paid by the day and women more likely to hold piece work positions. Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours’ Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England (Cornell University Press, 1992), 51–52. The source base may be considered compromised with regards to gender, then. This may in turn mean that scholars have underestimated the quantity of working women’s grievances. More research in this area would be useful. 16 “An Appeal to Editors,” The Mechanic, May 4, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm. 17 S.C. Hewitt, “Saving Time,” The Mechanic, May 11, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm; P., “The Factory Child [Poem],” The Mechanic, May 25, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm; “Glorious News from Abroad,” The Mechanic, May 4, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm; “To Mechanics [Poem],” The Mechanic, May 4, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm; “Bide Your Time [Poem],” The Mechanic, May 11, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm, etc. 35 back within them.”18 Workers, it is said, accepted the argument of capitalists that labor could be measured by duration of labor time. Or it is said that impersonal forces of “capitalism” drove economic actors towards “greater rationality [as] symbolized by the spread of clock time.”19 The assumption inherited from Marx’s Capital is that labor time, as a category, is inherently biased against workers. This may indeed be true but it is also true that some workers advanced mechanical labor time for their own purposes.

The first known agitation for a 10-hour day was made by journeymen carpenters in

Philadelphia in 1791. The ossification of the craft hierarchy in the late eighteenth century put increasing numbers of journeymen carpenters in the position of permanent wage workers, unlikely to ascend to the rank of master. The journeymen could choose to be paid by the piece or by the day, but since the piece rate was calculated based on a new and complex set of rules kept in a secret book to which the journeymen did not have access, they had no choice but to accept pay by the day if they wanted a reasonable ability to predict their income. While it was the master carpenters who in effect forced the journeymen into changing over from piece-rate to day-rate payment by establishing the secret rule book, it was the journeymen who demanded that the hours of labor be fixed into clock-measured units. The masters were content to exploit seasonal variations in the length of the day to their advantage: getting more labor out of workers in the summer and discharging them in the winter. The journeymen demanded that the schedule be fixed: 6am to 6pm, with two hours for meals, all year round.20

18 Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 86; See also Kulik, “Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island,” 28. 19 Hermann, Capitalism and the Political Economy of Work Time, 11–12. Note the passive construction in Hermann’s discussion of “work time.”; See also “the demands of industrial capitalism” in Kulik, “Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island,” 14. 20 Brody, “Time and Work during Early American Industrialism,” 39–43. 36

What this example shows is that contests over labor time were not restricted to situations in which technological or productive requirements for synchronization drove capitalists to the adoption of clock time. Clock time could enter into the labor contract at the insistence of the workers, too. And both sides could identify interests in measuring labor in terms of time—and time in terms of solar or mechanical units—divorced from the simple technological exigencies of factory production. Clearly more research is needed into the ways in which hours of labor were strategically used by workers in industries where the owners of capital did not yet make use of it themselves.

The ten-hour cause of the 1830s and ‘40s activated two bodies of rhetoric to solicit the support of New Englanders. As Teresa Ann Murphy documents, labor advocates availed themselves of discourses of moral reform and republican patriotism—as well as temperance, abolition, and Protestantism—to express their grievances and try to win over members of the propertied classes on grounds of sentiment and humanitarianism.21 Workers argued, for instance, that working hours were unduly long and detrimental to their development as virtuous republican citizens. The declaration of goals issued by the Lowell Female Labor Reform

Association—a labor rights association primarily focused on implementing a 10-hour day in

Massachusetts—and published in the Voice of Industry, argued that a reduction in hours was necessary for the workers to cultivate their higher capacities and become good democratic citizens, avoid the destruction of society by vice, and realize the state of being God intended for them.22 Some workers argued that the ten-hour movement was a conservative movement,

21 Murphy, Ten Hours’ Labor. 22 “Preamble to the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association,” The Voice of Industry, February 27, 1846, The Voice of Industry Archive, http://www.industrialrevolution.org/; “Sarah George Bagley”; Cf. Samuel Gompers’s testimony on the appropriate hours of labor in Wilson, Investigation of Taylor System of Shop Management, 22–34. A more physiological view came into vogue at the turn of the century and the issue of labor time increasingly became an issue of the wear and tear on the human-as-machine. For an 37 integral to the protection of the United States’ republican constitution.23 Other workers played off of paternalistic concerns about women’s morality, which was the substantial focus of an 1845 government investigation into the hours of labor by a special committee of the Massachusetts legislature.24

The other theme that appears in the writings of labor advocates is the idea of time ownership, which can be further subdivided into the themes of time-theft and time-inequality. In

1833, decades before Marx’s Capital, New England labor radical Seth Luther wrote an address to

New England workingmen in which he described employers stealing workers’ time by manipulating factory clocks or lying about the time on their watches. Imagining a representative child laborer and a representative visitor to New England’s mill towns, the visitor, Luther wrote,

“might see that child robbed, yes, robbed of a part of his time allowed for meals, by moving the hands of the clock backwards, or forwards, as would best accomplish that purpose.”25 A searing indictment of the Lowell corporations published in The Voice of Industry in 1846 argued that the practice of the mills slowing their clocks so as to “swindle” five minutes at the end of each working day from the workers added up to a theft of 20,000 working days per year across the ten largest corporations. The article translated this figure into four human (working) lifetimes, or

$12,000 in wages per year. This theft was not, however, translated into a measure of material

academic treatment of the subject see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (University of California Press, 1992). 23 “To Our Friends Abroad,” The Mechanic, April 27, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm. 24 The investigation was the result of a petition campaign organized by workers in Lowell and other Massachusetts mill towns. William Schouler, Chairman., “Investigation of Labor Conditions, 1845” (Massachusetts: Massachusetts House of Representatives, March 12, 1845), University of Massachusetts Lowell Libraries, http://library.uml.edu/clh/all/lab00.htm. 25 Seth Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, on the State of Education, and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and America (Office of the Working Man’s Advocate by George H. Evans, 1833), 20. 38 output.26 An 1847 article alleged that it was “an established rule” at two Lowell mills “to hoist the gate twenty-eight minutes from the time it shuts down for meals,” thus stealing two minutes of the workers’ time at each meal break.27 As we will discuss later in this chapter, this narrative of time theft can give the impression that the mills were much more temporally regular than they really were: while time theft no doubt occurred, absenteeism and production bottlenecks also contributed to irregular distributions of labor time.

Time theft obviously presumes a sort of ‘property’ in time, which made time subject also to discourses regarding the inequity of its distribution. Writing for The Mechanic, a clergyman in

Fall River urged companies to “give” workers more time so they could elevate themselves.28 The above-cited 1846 article calculating the value of the time stolen by Lowell corporations ended by sketching the figure of the company agent “trundl[ing]” home to enjoy his own time-richness in

“aristocratic luxury.”29 Even God had property claims to time. A morality tale in The Mechanic told of a Rhode Island man who worked on the Sabbath and thereby “robbed God of his seventh portion of time,” leading him to poverty and ruin no matter how many hours per day he worked.30 Perhaps most tellingly of all, the corporations were unwilling to cede the moral high ground in terms of time ownership: Corporate propaganda in defense of the Lowell mills directed at workers pointed out that workers had their evenings to themselves, as if suggesting both that

26 A Mechanic, “Facts for the Operatives,” The Voice of Industry, February 27, 1846, http://industrialrevolution.org/original-issues/1846/1846-02-27.pdf. 27 Lowell Operative, “Losing Minutes,” The Voice of Industry, January 8, 1847, The Voice of Industry Archive, http://www.industrialrevolution.org/. 28 S.C. Hewitt, “For the Mechanic [letter to the Editor. Dighton, April 29, 1844],” The Mechanic, May 11, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm. 29 A Mechanic, “Facts for the Operatives.” 30 “An All and Every Day Man.,” The Mechanic, May 11, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm. 39 the other parts of the day did not ‘belong’ to them, and that they were ‘gifted’ time by the company.31

What these examples show, and there are more to be had, is that labor was becoming synonymous with time and not with the production of goods. Even where workers continued to be paid on piece rates (where payment was measured per unit of output), the rates were so calculated and the schedules so constructed that they arguably functioned as payment for units of time in the accounting books of manufacturers. Workers often complained, for instance, that productivity increases due to changes in technology or an increase in the amount of fixed capital per worker lead to either relative or real decreases in piece rates.32 Schedules remained fixed.

And as early as 1847 the Blackstone Manufacturing Company calculated the total number of work days performed per year in their annual report as a measure of the labor input in the production process. For the year 1846, for instance, 670 “hands” worked a total of 182,822 and

1/3rd days. Of which total 8,074 days was worked by the 30 males in Carding Room 1.33

Granted, quantitative measures of material output continued to be used in parallel with quantitative measures of time input, for instance the number of yards of fabric woven per loom per day was another statistical measure used by the Blackstone Company.34 But as companies began to rely on pay by the day (and later by the hour) as a unit of accounting, and total number

31 Almira, “The Spirit of Discontent,” Lowell Offering, c 1840, http://courses.wcupa.edu/johnson/Low- offr2.html. 32 See “The Factory System,” The Voice of Industry, June 19, 1845, The Voice of Industry Archive, http://www.industrialrevolution.org/; Sarah George Bagley, “A Few Cents More,” The Voice of Industry, April 24, 1846, The Voice of Industry Archive, http://www.industrialrevolution.org/; “Payroll Time Sheet (piecework) Oct-Nov. 1874” November 1874, Boott/Flather Collection, Center for Lowell History, Box 29; Similar observations can be found in Brody, “Time and Work during Early American Industrialism.” 33 “Labor in Mills for Year Ending 31st December 1846” (Blackstone, MA, 1847), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 708. 34 “No. Yards Wove per Loom per Day for the Year Ending 27th December 1851” (Blackstone, MA, 1851), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 708. 40 of days worked (later hours), we get closer and closer to E.P. Thompson’s description of industrial societies: “not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant.”35

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The Blackstone Manufacturing Company was founded in 1808 by a group of Rhode

Island merchants to manufacture cotton thread and, starting in 1820, cloth.36 The mill buildings were located across the state line in Blackstone, Massachusetts. They were “complete process” mills, meaning that they took in raw cotton and outputted finished cloth.37 The Blackstone

Manufacturing Company remained in business for over a century before it was sold in 1924. The mills built by the Blackstone Manufacturing Company continued to operate under new ownership until the mid-1950s. Its longevity; its relatively complete set of existing records; and its location in the heart of the Blackstone River watershed, the earliest site of Industrialization in the

United States and a major nexus in the manufacturing landscape of New England, make it an excellent case study of nineteenth century New England industrial life.

The most obvious thing that one notices when looking at the records of the Blackstone

Manufacturing Company is how far from the temporality of the idealized factory of economic theory and political rhetoric it actually was. Whereas historians, economists, efficiency engineers, and workers’ advocates would (and do) paint the nineteenth-century factory as having a sort of sameness to it, every day being exactly the same, the Blackstone Manufacturing Company’s mills continued to struggle with temporal irregularity into the mid to late nineteenth century. Among the surviving public notices given by the agent to the operatives, the greater portion are

35 Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” 61. 36 For a brief introduction to the Blackstone Manufacturing Company, see Harold E. Kemble, “RIHS: Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records. Historical Note.” (Providence, RI), Rhode Island Historical Society, accessed November 6, 2015, http://rihs.minisisinc.com/rihs/scripts/mwimain.dll/1264/1/1/2966?RECORD&UNION=Y. 37 Anthony F C Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972), 164. 41 announcements that the mills were temporarily reducing their operating hours to lower labor costs, temporarily increasing their operating hours to lower other costs, or temporarily suspending operation for one or two weeks to still further reduce costs.38 In 1874, Henry C

Kimball, the agent, was forced to issue a notice stating that, “Agreement having been made for permission to be absent for a large number of those employed in the mills, on Wednesday next,

22nd inst for the purpose of going on an excursion, Notice is hereby given that the mills will be stopped entirely on the day and for the purpose indicated.” His reminder at the end of the notice that the management was in control of the mill’s schedule sounds weak and defensive: “notice is also further given that this Company will not grant any further leave of absence during the present season for a similar purpose, when it will cause any interruption to the running of the machinery.”39

While these schedule alterations and workday cancellations are non-trivial, the greater body of evidence of temporal irregularity comes from the accounting ledgers. In 1854, it was relatively rare for any of the workers to work the full 24 days in a pay period. Typically, a few

38 Blackstone Manufacturing Co, “Meeting of the Owners of the Blackstone Company” (Providence, RI, November 4, 1839), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1; Silas H Kimball, “Blackstone Dec 24 1839” (Blackstone, MA, December 24, 1839), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1; Blackstone Manufacturing Co, “Notice” (Blackstone, MA, June 10, 1861), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1; Henry C Kimball, “Notice” (Blackstone, MA, September 19, 1861), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1; Henry C Kimball, “Notice” (Blackstone, MA, June 25, 1861), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1; Kimball, “Notice,” September 19, 1861, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1; Kimball, “Notice,” June 25, 1861, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1; Henry C Kimball, “Notice” (Blackstone, MA, July 26, 1875), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1; Henry C Kimball, “Untitled” December 15, 1883, Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1; “Untitled” n.d., Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1. 39 Henry C Kimball, “Notice” (Blackstone, MA, July 15, 1874), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1. 42 half-days were lost by the room as a whole each pay period, indicated by the fact that all workers had a ½-day or ¾-day uniformly marked on the same date. Production bottlenecks are the most likely culprit for erratic time losses by the carding room as a whole. An interruption in the supply of raw cotton to the mill or in the picker room could force the carding room into idleness. 40 On days when the carding room operated a full day’s work, however, it was still common for at least one or more of the carders to miss 1/8th of the day or more.41

As is to be expected given increasingly dependable supply chains and what historians have identified as a strengthening grip of temporal regularity on workers over the course of the nineteenth century, the carding room’s account books show gradually increasing attendance rates and proportions of workers with perfect attendance.42 By the 1880s the proportion of workers showing perfect attendance was substantially higher than it had been a generation prior in the

1850s.43

The imperfections in the Blackstone Manufacturing Company’s regularity coexisted with an apparent anxiety over the need to control the operating time of the factory. It ought to be kept in mind that this was not a technological imperative of any particular machine: individual machines could be turned on and off while the power train from the water wheel was engaged, meaning that an individual’s absenteeism wouldn’t halt the entire room.44 The anxiety over

40 The carders received cotton from the picker room, where it was cleaned and puffed, and, with the help of carding machines, aligned the fibers of the cotton to make them roughly parallel to each other. Carding machines were made up of a series of wheels covered in bristles that pulled the fibers into alignment. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution, 137–138. 41 “Carding Room Time Book” (Blackstone, MA, December 1854), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 10. 42 “Carding Room Time Book” (Blackstone, MA, May 1859), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 15; J.M. Willey, “Carding Room No 1” (Blackstone, MA, January 1870), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 27. 43 “Carding Room. Time Book & Pay Roll” (Blackstone, MA, July 1886), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 51. 44 Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution, 134. 43 temporal regularity must have had other sources. The most materialist explanation could be that the different stages in the process were temporally synchronized so that an interruption in the carding room, for instance, would throw the mule spinners into idleness, in turn affecting the weavers’ ability to work. There may also have been a certain amount of class politics at play, with capitalists believing they had a paternalistic responsibility over their workers. The cultural and moral weight given to punctuality starting around this time should not be underestimated.45

In early November 1839 the owners of the Blackstone Company decided to run the mills from 9 o’clock in the morning to noon, and from 1 to 4 o’clock in the afternoon, for a total of just six hours operating time per day. The decision to cut hours, the Company said, came “in consequence of the extraordinary pressure of the times.”46 Six weeks later, a memo issued to the workers by mill superintendent Henry C Kimball declared the experiment a failure: “The

Blackstone Company find by trial that they cannot make these goods so cheap working half time as they did when the mill ran full time. Therefore have made up their mind, to make some alternations at 1st January in some way to reduce the Cost of manufacturing.” Kimball made a proposal to the workers that rather than having their wages reduced upon the return to full-time, they might be convinced to eat breakfast before coming into work in the morning, eliminating the need for a breakfast break later in the day. This would allow them to “work full time at the

45 “Keep it before yourself, Mechanic, that punctuality is a virtue; that work promised should always be done at the time and well done, and then you need give yourself no fears of a want of business.” From “[Untitled],” The Mechanic, April 27, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm; Victorian moralists like Samuel Smiles helped spread an incredibly popular cult of punctuality in the nineteenth century. See Vanessa Ogle, “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s,” The American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013): 1376–1402, for a discussion of the global reach of this discourse. The reader may also look to workers’ newspapers such as The Voice of Industry and The Mechanic for discussions about how to best use one’s scarce time productively. There was a fear among the upper classes that idle time would lead the working class to vice, a damning accusation that working class advocates strenuously denied. 46 Blackstone Manufacturing Co, “Meeting of the Owners of the Blackstone Company,” MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1. 44 same wages making a gain of ½ an hour, time which will enable us to make goods cheaper without reducing wages.”47

To modern readers the illogicality of the proposal is apparent: eliminating the 30-minute breakfast break is equivalent to extending the working day by 30 minutes against a static rate of pay per day or equivalent to reducing the rate of pay per day against a static number of labor hours. The equivalencies between 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon, and between reducing wages per hour and increasing hours per wages, are deeply encoded in contemporary labor practice.

Biernacki would argue that the viability of Kimball’s proposal can be read as evidence that labor was not then viewed as a temporally continuous process and that it was not measured in units of time. Kimball’s suggestion would keep the beginning and end times of the working day as they were before the November 4th move to short-time, and would keep the rate for daily pay the same. Therefore, so the logic goes, the move would actually be a real way out of the reduced wages versus extended time dichotomy. But the existence of a New England labor movement that was already articulating its claims in terms of time theft and clock manipulation poses challenges here. If, in accordance with the views of the radical labor newspapers, labor was understood to be expressed with fungible time units placed anywhere in the day, Kimball’s proposal would have not made much sense to his audience, or even to Kimball himself.

Ultimately, we cannot on the basis of this example determine which speaker—Kimball or

Seth Luther—captures whatever kernel of American labor time ideology may have existed (a la

Biernacki). In the end, Kimball’s proposal was rejected by the workers despite his attempts to make it difficult for them to reject it. In a letter to Kimball, the company owners told him to commence running the mills on the old full-time schedule and to announce a 15 percent wage

47 Kimball, “Blackstone Dec 24 1839,” MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1. 45 reduction to take effect two weeks from the date of the announcement. Without an existing time table for the Blackstone mills, it is impossible to say what the schedule looked like. But if

Blackstone was similar to one of its nearby peers, the Peace Dale Mills, it may have been running

11 hour days (exclusive of one hour for lunch). If so, the 30-minute breakfast break would have constituted less than 5 percent of the working day. Meaning that even under conservative assumptions about the length of the Blackstone mill working day, the 15 percent wage reduction was in excess of the costs of the breakfast break to the company.48 It was, therefore, undertaken as a punitive measure. The company wrote to Kimball that it was “surprised… that the people at

Blackstone are so blind to their interest” as to reject his proposal.49 As was often the case in early

New England factories, punitive measures were combined with corporate paternalism.50

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Historian Paolo Quattrone argues that “time can be conceived as a concept which is constructed thanks to the use of recording practices such as accounting.” 51 While this claim may be too sweeping, nineteenth century accounting was absolutely a technology for timekeeping, and it would be hard to argue that it was not performative and did not at least partly contribute to the creation in fact of the categories it asserted in theory. It permitted the measurement, observation, and recording of time in ways different from but perhaps hardly less consequential than clocks. Modern accounting required continuous data recording and it attempted to imitate

48 The mill would have to be operating 3.34 hours per day for the 30-minute breakfast break to represent 15 percent of the total operating time, and hence to justify a 15 percent wage reduction as the cost reduction needed to maintain then-existing costs. 49 “Mr S H Kimball,” July 2, 1840, Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Box 1 Folder 1. 50 For a discussion of corporate paternalism in the case of the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, see Peter Stewart, “A Brief History of the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, 1802–1918,” Textile History Review 4, no. 1 (January 1963): 12–23. 51 Paolo Quattrone, “Is Time Spent, Passed or Counted? The Missing Link Between Time and Accounting History,” The Accounting Historians Journal 32, no. 1 (June 2005): 190, 203. 46 reality with its inscription of continuously unfolding series of events developing in real time. Its ability to mimic real time was limited only by the physical limits of the bookkeeper and the dangers of too much information.52

The Blackstone Manufacturing Company managed its labor accounting with “time books.” The time books, discussed above, were organized in a grid. The columns listed, from left to right: name, pay rate, the days of the week, the weekly total, and the pay-period total. Each worker’s account was one row of the sheet. From the beginning of the accounting series to 1874 work was measured in day-units. A full day’s work was noted with the number “1” and fractions of a day’s work were noted as fractions of 1 (e.g. “½,” “¾”). The day was subdivided, at its most minute level, into eighths of a day.

The use of day-units in time books can seem incongruous in a context in which a large number of bells and clocks owned by mill companies were signaling workers to and fro in accordance with well-defined schedules, and companies sometimes violated those schedules for the purpose of stealing a few spare minutes in a day. We might think that the time books ought to be more precise, or at least attempt to appear so.

The persistence of imprecise day-units need not invalidate the notion that time was a commodity worth fighting over between nascent working and bourgeois classes. One of the most banal explanations could be the amount of effort exact time recording would have involved for the scores of workers under the supervision of each overseer. That could partly explain why when the time-recorder (aka punch clock) was invented in 1888 it found a ready market, especially

52 On the new, continuous bookkeeping of the nineteenth century: Michael Zakim, “The Bottom Line,” unpublished paper presented to the 19th Century US History Workshop at Brown University, Department of History, September 2015. For cultural histories that deal with accounting in general, and double-entry bookkeeping in particular, see Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660– 1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 47 among large firms where the logistical burden of time keeping was greatest. The time-recorder diffused the labor of time keeping among all workers by requiring them to punch their own work tickets with a time-stamp when they arrived at and left the mill. Within five years of the patent’s approval in 1888, over 2,500 Bundy time-recorders were in use in American manufacturing, disproportionately employed in large companies.53 One of its main selling points was its ability to save money on watchmen who would otherwise be necessary to track entry and exit times.54

Exact time accounting may also have been unstrategic for companies. If they were swindling workers at all, it would not have made sense to go through the immense effort of falsifying hundreds or thousands of records a day. They may well have decided that it was safer to use day-units and avoid the possibility of scrutiny. This may help explain why it is that the

Blackstone Manufacturing Company did eventually switch to hour-units in September 1874.

In 1874, Massachusetts became the first state to pass an enforceable ten-hour law.55

Previous work-time laws passed in the United States had declared ten hours to be a full day’s work, but had included a debilitating loophole: employers and employees were allowed to privately contract for longer hours of work, which they, of course, did.56 The new Massachusetts law instead stipulated that no women or minors were to be employed for more than ten hours in any one day unless it was for the purpose of shortening the hours on another day of the week

(typically this was Saturday), and in all cases the maximum number of hours for the week would

53 Williard Legrand Bundy, Time Recorder, US393205 A, filed August 3, 1887, and issued November 20, 1888, http://www.google.com/patents/US393205; The Office (D. Williams, 1891); “Advertisement 31 -- No Title,” Scientific American LXVII, no. 3 (July 16, 1892): 46; “An Accurate Automatic Time Recorder” LXVI, no. 25 (June 18, 1892): 386; “The Bundy Automatic Time Recorder at the Exposition,” Scientific American LXIX, no. 25 (December 16, 1893): 389. 54 Bundy, Time Recorder; “The Bundy Automatic Time Recorder at the Exposition.” 55 Economic History Association, “Hours of Work in U.S. History,” EHnet, accessed November 14, 2015, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/. 56 See, for instance, Rhode Island’s short-time law, first appearing in the codification of 1857. State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Of Masters, Apprentices, and Of Factory and Other Laborers, vol. XX Chapter 139, 1857. 48 be 60. A printed notice of this law was also to be posted in every manufactory.57 Despite nominally applying only to women and minors, labor advocates and business interests were well aware that the new ten-hour law would dictate the hours for the manufactory as a whole. It wasn’t possible to run the departments in which adult men worked (e.g. mule spinning) while the departments conventionally staffed by women (e.g. carding) were off and the roles performed by minors (e.g. replacing bobbins) were unattended. And since adult men commanded higher wages, replacing female and child labor with adult male labor would have been prohibitively expensive despite the fact that adult men could be employed on longer hours. By limiting the legislation to women and children the legislature was able to claim that it was exercising its authority to protect those vulnerable populations rather than engaging in outright economic regulation, which was significantly less popular at the time.

It was the 1874 statute that led the Blackstone Company to change their accounting practices. After “reflecting” on the “60 hours work law,” the Goddard Brothers, company agents in Providence for the Blackstone Company, suggested to mill superintendent Henry C Kimball on September 19 that he write up a new timetable and commence paying workers by the hour.58

Saturday, September 26 was the last day measured in day-units at Blackstone. The following

Monday workers would return to find the mill running on short time (9 hours per day for 5 days a week) and, more lastingly, counting their labor by the hour.

It may be the case that the change in accounting units was an attempt to ensure that the company would not be accused of violations of the 60-hour law and charged for damages by the legally empowered workers. Whatever the case, the seamless change in units demonstrates that

57 The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Of the Employment of Labor, vol. 74, 1874, http://archive.org/details/publicstatutesof00mass. 58 Goddard Brothers, “To Henry C Kimball,” September 19, 1874, Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series F Box 5 Folder 4. 49 labor time was already a developed and precise way to represent labor by 1874. Immediately, the new notation scheme was used to parse the labor time of workers down to the quarter-hour level.59 The company also lost no time in translating the old pay system into “cents per hour,” a concept so easy for contemporaries to adopt that the guiding phrase “cents per hour” usually did not re-appear after being used once to indicate the units for the pay column immediately after the transition from day-unit to hour-unit accounting.60 The company painstakingly tallied hundreds of hours per worker per pay period for scores of pay periods to ensure that workers were not over- or under-paid for their time at prevailing wage rates of 5¢ to 10¢ per hour.

The paucity of materials related to this transition in the company archive is telling: there is no indication that workers or clerks protested the change to a longstanding practice of day- units and it attracted virtually no comment in the correspondence between mill agents and company ownership or outside suppliers. If there can be any doubt that this rapid and smooth transition to hourly accounting indicates that, in the production process, labor was understood via the mediating concept of labor time, there at least cannot be any doubt that after September

1874 the Blackstone Manufacturing Company had definitively adopted mechanical clock time as the means of signifying and organizing labor.

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As JoAnn Yates has shown, bureaucratic forms of management based on written records and detailed accounting practices developed in the American factory in the mid- to late- nineteenth century.61 So-called “systematic management” provides the historical linkage between

59 See the entry for 2 October 1874 for Maggie Ryan in Alvin A. Ford, “Weaving Room No 1” (Blackstone, MA, 1873), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 262. 60 George C. Gardner, “Carding Room No. 1.” (Blackstone, MA, 1873), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 32. 61 Yates, Control Through Communication, 1–11. 50 the objectification of time and its role in centralizing power in the hands of experts. If time is a

‘thing,’ in this case an economic input, the business corporation must exert centralized control over it to keep down costs.

Much of this chapter has been spent describing how labor came to be figured in terms of time, and how that came to mean a particular kind of mechanical clock time with uniform units.

We now turn to how this object was increasingly subjected to centralized control. We first consider the time-control structure of the nineteenth century time-disciplined factory and then turn to the evidence of a counter-movement on the part of workers to contest capital’s monopoly on time measurement and distribution.

The time-control structure of the factory included bells, timetables, overseers and watchmen. Overseers equipped with watches kept the time books for their rooms and enforced discipline and punctuality inside the mill buildings.62 Watchmen, on the other hand, were responsible for controlling the entry and exit points to the mills during operating hours. They only actually entered the mills’ workrooms during their night rounds, when the employees were not present.

The entry and exit points to the mills were key chokepoints in the disciplinary regime. As such, they were highly charged spaces. Even a small mill yard would have been enclosed by a fence, accessible only via a handful of gates.63 Larger mills, like the massive Boott Cotton Mill in

Lowell (1835), looked something like fortresses, and had gatehouses for the watchmen.

62 Time books were books that contained the labor performed by each worker measured in units of time (either days or hours). Pay was determined by the amount of time spent working, as listed in the time book. 63 Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution, 130. Advertisement 31 -- No Title Scientific American (1845-1908); Jul 16, 1892; Vol. LXVII., No. 3.; American Periodicals pg. 46

51

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Figure 3 (left): Time Table of the Lowell Mills, 1853, Baker Library, Harvard Business School

Figure 4 (above): Bundy Manufacturing Company Advertisement, 1892, Scientific American, proquest.com

One writer in the worker-run Voice of Industry newspaper described a tyrannical company agent

standing in front of the factory gate at lunch time, pocket watch in hand, silently intimidating the

workers into cutting short their lunch breaks for fear of running afoul of the master’s watch.64

Another commentator in the Voice of Industry similarly wrote:

It is, and has been since 1841, an established rule to hoist the gate twenty-eight minutes from the time it shuts down for meals, and on commencing in the morning it is to be hoisted eight minutes from the time that the Merrimack bell strikes, which is two minutes earlier at each time of hoisting, than is practiced on that Corporation. Thus you see by tightening the screws in this way, the operatives lose from four to six minutes per day, under the pretense of allowing them thirty minutes for meals.65

The even more punitive “lock out” system that was practiced in England did not make its way to

the industrializing United States, perhaps in part because locking workers outside the factory to

64 A Mechanic, “Facts for the Operatives.” 65 Lowell Operative, “Losing Minutes.” 52 punish tardiness would have been an unacceptable waste of labor power in perennially labor- short New England.66 But penalties ranging from wage reductions to the loss of premiums to dismissal were still in place. In 1878 Rhode Island’s Peace Dale Manufacturing Company instituted a rule whereby entering or exiting the company’s premises other than by the regular gates was a dismissible offense.67 A circular distributed by the same to its workers in 1882 makes clear that the gates were mandatory because they facilitated surveillance and enforced the time schedule: “everyone,” it read, is “expected to begin work on time; also, the only mill gate for entering and leaving the mill, will be that one near the Office.”68 The Blackstone Manufacturing

Company, in similar form, promulgated rules in 1870 that declared that the East and West gates of the premises were to be shut immediately as the bells stopped ringing. A third gate, presumably placed for ease of monitoring, was to be opened fifteen minutes after the bells stopped ringing, to receive those who missed the appointed start time.69

Not only did the tools of entry and exit surveillance allow companies to enforce schedules, they were instrumental in the creation of schedules. Factory schedules in this time period indicated the hours at which bells would be struck.70 The bells signaled to workers that it was time for them to go to the factory. Other bell strikes announced that the workers may leave off

66 See Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914, 111 on the lock out system as practiced in England. 67 John N Hazard and Rowland Hazard II, “Co-Operation Circular No. 1” (Circular, Peace Dale, Rhode Island, January 1, 1878), Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 483 SG36 Series 3 Folder 2–6. 68 Rowland Hazard II and John N Hazard, “Experiment for Shorter Hours. Circular No. 1.” (Circular, Peace Dale, Rhode Island, December 30, 1882), Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 483 SG36 Series 3 Folder 2–1. 69 “Record Book A” 1870, Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Vol 1. 70 See Peace Dale Manufacturing Co, “Time Table Rhode Island Mills,” July 13, 1853, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 483 SG36 Series 3 Folder 2–20; And the many Lowell time tables issued throughout the years, for example: “Time Table of the Lowell Mills” (B.H. Penhallow, October 21, 1851), The Voice of Industry Archive, http://www.industrialrevolution.org/time-table-of-mills.html; “Time Table of the Lowell Mills” (B.H. Penhallow, 1853), Baker Library, Harvard Business School; “Time Table of the Lowell Mills” (B.H. Penhallow, 1855), Baker Library, Harvard Business School; “Time Table of the Lowell Mills” (B.H. Penhallow, 1856), Baker Library, Harvard Business School, and so on. 53 work. In this there was an asymmetry: the closing bell indicated the end of the period of work but the starting bell governed entrance to the mill as opposed to the beginning of work. There is a distinction to be drawn between timing entry to the mill and timing the beginning of work, but it is unclear how important that distinction actually was. Obviously, timing entry to the mill is not the same as timing the labor of workers, as managers would do at the turn of the twentieth century, but we might reasonably posit that timing entry to the mill was used as a technologically and commercially reasonable proxy for the timing of labor itself. And efforts were made to bring mill-entry time and start-of-work time into as close an alignment as possible. In 1882 the Peace

Dale Manufacturing Company suspended the customary five-minute grace period allowed operatives between the closing of the gates and the start of work.71 And rules for overseers throughout the region unsurprisingly stressed personal punctuality and the enforcement of punctuality among workers in their rooms.72

Factory time tables also evidence another ambiguity: the desire to impose mechanical time discipline existed in a social context in which mechanical time was not universally accessible or understood. Part of the companies’ battles over control of labor time had to involve the attempt to get New Englanders to think of time in ways compatible with the accounting practices and coordination requirements of the industrial factory. The Peace Dale Manufacturing

Company’s 1853 timetable included the factory’s starting and stopping times as well as the times of sun rise and sun set for eight subdivisions of the year.73 At such an early date in the spread of public timekeeping devices, the company seems to have been anxious to help workers to be able

71 Rowland Hazard II and John N Hazard, “Experiment for Shorter Hours. Circular No. 1.,” MSS 483 SG36 Series 3 Folder 2–1. 72 Massachusetts Dept of Labor and Industries Division of Statistics, Annual Report on the Statistics of Labor, 1882, 225; W., “Christian Principle Illustrated by Example,” The Mechanic, May 25, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm. 73 Peace Dale Manufacturing Co, “Time Table Rhode Island Mills,” MSS 483 SG36 Series 3 Folder 2– 20. 54 to obey the timetable by translating it into vernacular (i.e. solar) timekeeping and by accommodating seasonal variation. Around the same time, in 1851, the first surviving timetable for the Lowell mills was published. A much more urban context, Lowell’s time tables instead carried the message: “The Standard time being that of the meridian of Lowell, as shown by the regulator clock of Joseph Raynes, 43 Central Street.”74 The difference between these timetables suggests how companies may have responded to operating in more or less clock-literate contexts.

The enforcers of the entry and exit times were the watchmen (of course the overseers with their time books also monitored entry and exit). Prior to the introduction of punch-clock technology, which could track workers automatically, watchmen were needed to enforce the rules of the gate. The earliest date for which there is positive evidence of watchmen at Blackstone is

1855, when a time book appears that records their labor time.75 In 1855 the company employed two watchmen full-time during the work-week, and two Sunday watchmen. In comparison with the records kept about mill operatives, those about watchmen are spotty and incomplete. What

74 “Time Table of the Lowell Mills,” October 21, 1851. Two interesting phenomena can be observed in the series of Lowell timetables published from 1851 to 1887: the source of standard time changed from one clock to another and then to an aural signal (the Merrimack Company’s bell), and also moved around on the page; and there was a gradual phasing-out of seasonal time variations over the three decades before a rather inexplicable return to seasonally varying time in 1887. More research is needed to determine the reasons for these changes. 75 “Watchman’s Time Book” (Blackstone, MA, 1855), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 463; According to the earliest company statistics I have been able to locate, in 1846 a total of 670 “hands” worked at the mills. See “Labor in Mills for Year Ending 31st December 1846,” MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 708; Wheeler writes that the company began keeping records in earnest in 1823, but I have not been able to consult data about the size of the workforce prior to the 1840s. See Alison Wheeler, “The Forces of Industrialization and the Blackstone Manufacturing Company, 1808-1864” (Honors Thesis, Brown University, 1991), Rhode Island Historical Society, HD9859.W43 1991 A workforce of such considerable size would surely have justified employing a watchman, but I have yet to find documents positively identifying people employed exclusively as watchmen earlier than 1855. 55 can be said is that over the next half-century the company expanded its full-time watchman staff to three and then to four watchmen. It also added two dedicated night-watchmen.76

The watchmen were intended to enforce discipline on the mill operatives but they were also subject to discipline and surveillance in ways more profound and technologically sophisticated than any applied to mill operatives at the time. The very nature of their work—the fact that they were supposed to constantly be walking around, unlike mill operatives who were supposed to constantly remain at their station—meant that they could not be monitored the way other workers were. Whereas other workers were watched with human eyes, watchmen had to have a portable monitoring technology (a watch) that could follow them on their walks. As carriers of portable timekeeping technologies watchmen extended management’s ability to regulate the time and space of the factory, and its workers, but they also were subjected to a disciplinary system more sophisticated than the one they were hired to enforce. The watchman was watched.

Among the earliest practicable watchman’s time-detectors was that invented in 1861 by

German inventor John Bürk. It consisted of a massive watch with a strip of paper running along the circumference of the dial face, inside the casing of the device. The strip of paper was fixed to the rotation of the hands, so it moved position as the hour and minute hands did. A company agent could chain special keys to specific locations. Each key, when inserted into the device, pushed on pins inside the machine in a unique pattern, which pushed on the paper strip and left an indentation. By extracting the paper record with its time and location markings at the end of a shift, the employer could see exactly what time the watchman was in each of the rooms along his

76 “Watchman’s Time Book” (Blackstone, MA, 1871), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 464; “Watchman’s Time Book” (Blackstone, MA, 1902), Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series D Vol 465. 56 route.77 Later improvements on the design over the following decades continued to make use of unmovable keys that could make unique indentations on some sort of recording medium attached to a mechanical clock.78

Records from the 1880s suggest that watchmen were almost entirely subordinated to these timekeeping machines in that period. (I have been unable to find records from earlier time periods, before the invention of the time-detector). The Blackstone Manufacturing Company, for instance, issued a document detailing the “arrangement of watchmen’s time,” which only contained instructions regarding the times and locations at which watch-clock pins had to be

“driven.” Watchmen were expected to “drive pins” at clock sites 2 and 5 every hour on the hour, and at clock sites 3 and 4 every hour at the half-past mark.79 Similar rules prescribing half-hourly

‘pin driving’ applied in all (or almost all) Lowell manufactories.80

These machines were designed to overcome what was seen as an inherent tendency among watchmen (as among employees generally) to shirk their duties. Bürk’s patent defined his time-detector as a device “for the purpose of controlling watchmen,” a phrase that would also appear in company advertisements years later.81 His time-detector was to give “a clear, true, and permanent picture of the circuit of the watch man in regard to time and direction,” and the keys were designed such that the employer could constantly change the authenticating indentation

77 John Burk, Improved Watchman’s Time-Detector, US31052 A, issued January 1, 1861, http://www.google.com/patents/US31052. 78 Jacob E. Buerk, Improvement in Watchmen’s Time-Detectors, US48048 A, issued June 6, 1865, http://www.google.com/patents/US48048; Jacob E. Buerk, Improvement in watchmen s time detecters, US181519 A, issued August 29, 1876, http://www.google.com/patents/US181519; “Buerk’s Watchman’s Clock (Advertisement),” American Machinist, December 20, 1884. 79 “Arrangement Watchmen’s Time, Pins, Etc.” June 1880, Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Vol 1. 80 Massachusetts Dept of Labor and Industries Division of Statistics, Annual Report on the Statistics of Labor, 226–227. 81 “Buerk’s Watchman’s Clock (Advertisement).” 57 pattern to make forgery impossible.82 The 1865 model used pins and levers to produce indentations from the inside of the device outward, so as to preclude the possibility of counterfeit indentations being made. The patent description went farther, writing:

The watch of course is intended to be locked, so that the watchman cannot get at the paper dial in order to produce fraudulent perforations to cover a neglect of his duty, and the keys, simple as they look, are so shaped that they cannot easily be imitated, for the slightest difference in the height or position of the bit would produce different action.83

The disciplinary potential of these devices only grew once they started to be integrated into electrical systems that allowed the watchman’s check-point times to be registered at a central repository, either in the main office or across the city.84 New adaptations of telegraph technology allowed company agents to move beyond after-the-fact monitoring of watchmen’s time discipline to real-time tracking of their performance from a remote location. And again what can only be called an apparent cat-and-mouse game between aggressively lazy watchmen and cunning inventors continued apace. A technology was patented in 1882 by an employee of a telegraphic watchmen company that brought a second “tell-tale” circuit and recording instrument into the system to register a watchman’s attempts to either close the electrical circuit from some place other than a designated station or to access the primary recording device to tamper with it.85 The history and implications of these telegraphic watchmen company are the subject of chapter two.

Telegraph-based networks notwithstanding, these devices even in their relatively ‘primitive’ non- electrical variants allowed a level of supervision and control on the part of upper management

82 Burk, Improved Watchman’s Time-Detector. 83 Buerk, Improvement in Watchmen’s Time-Detectors. 84 At the Blackstone Manufacturing Company this development happened in 1882. See “June 1882” June 1882, Blackstone Manufacturing Company Records, Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 9 SG 1 Series G Vol 1. 85 George W. Adams, Watchman’s Electric Register., US265912 A, filed August 22, 1882, and issued October 10, 1882, http://www.google.com/patents/US265912. 58 that would have been unimaginable in the early-nineteenth century. By equipping watchmen with time-detectors, management was able to map their movements across time with all the certainty and precision of the machine.86

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The contest between labor and capital over labor time was not fought exclusively in terms of restricting the hours of labor that could be demanded of workers, whether that restriction be legal or contractual. The struggle for time also involved the timekeeping apparatus itself. The clocks and bell towers erected by the mill owners gave them a good deal of control over workers in situations where labor time was measured in units of clock time as opposed to solar time. They became the sole arbiters of ‘the’ time and, as Seth Luther wrote sarcastically, masters of “patent lever ‘clockwork’ of the first quality running on diamonds, which never was guilty of keeping the true time while in the atmosphere of a manufacturing village, or in the pocket of an agent, overseer, or owner of a cotton mill.”87 Workers who owned their own watches may have compared the time kept on their pieces with the factory’s official time—as the Voice of Labor correspondents above did—but watch ownership was not universal in this time period.

Alexis McCrossen has done much to complicate the historiography on nineteenth century clock and watch ownership. Even relatively lower income workers bought cheap watches, she says, and the device was present throughout the social strata of society. But for most workers (she excepts “overseers, railroad men, scientists, surveyors, and navigators”) the device was used to establish social status rather than for work-related purposes. Indeed, she points out, most work

86 An article about Willard L. Bundy’s time-recorder, an early punch clock device, wrote that the workers’ time “is accurately registered, for it is taken by a time keeper which makes no mistakes.” The Office. 87 Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, on the State of Education, and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and America, 20. 59 clothing did not have pockets in which to put a watch.88 Among her arguments for why modern time consciousness ought not be attributed to Americans until the last twenty years of the century, she says that most workers’ labor was not calculated by the hour, that time pressures from the market did not require timekeeping devices to negotiate them, and that a task orientation of work predominated.89 But elsewhere she also writes that mills, factories, plantations, and farms “employed bells, clocks, and watches to command punctuality, to measure efficiency and productivity and, in the case of free labor, to mete out hourly wages.”90 The contradiction can perhaps be explained by her focus on a national culture of clock time consciousness. Our focus here is on tracing the roots of the objectification of time such that it could be subjected of particular kinds of analyses, discourses, and control regimes. And it demonstrably the case that some workers did use watches to corroborate and contest factory time standards, and did use the hour-unit as the primary way of negotiating over and signifying labor, as McCrossen also attests. We now turn to how workers contested factory time standards collectively and publicly with what were known as ‘Mechanics’ Bells.’

The idea of a Mechanics’ Bell is typified by the most famous of them: the one built in

New York City in 1831. Called “the first victory won on this continent for less hours of toil,” by labor leader George McNeil, the bell was paid for by the shipwrights of lower Manhattan.91 Prior to the erection of the Mechanics’ Bell the shipwrights worked from sunrise to sunset. The use of seasonal rhythms was viewed as problematic because it meant long days in the summer and opened up the potential for short-changing on break times and stopping time by management.

88 Alexis McCrossen, “The ‘Very Delicate Construction’ of Pocket Watches and Time Consciousness in the Nineteenth‐Century United States,” Winterthur Portfolio 44, no. 1 (March 2010): 1–30, doi:10.1086/651538. Quotation is from p16. 89 Ibid., 16. 90 McCrossen, Marking Modern Times, 46. 91 George M. McNeill, Labor Movement: The Problem of To-Day (A.M. Bridgman & Company, 1887), 345. 60

Similar to the journeymen carpenters of Philadelphia, it was the shipwrights who militated for a ten-hour day marked and measured by clock time. To enforce the regime they had the bell built within earshot of the docks, and paid a war veteran $50 a year to ring the bell at 7am, 12pm,

1pm, and 6pm. The bell was both a symbol and an instrument of worker-ownership of labor time’s signification and dissemination.

Gary Kulik has argued for the existence of a Mechanics’ Bell in Pawtucket Rhode Island in 1828. It is known that a clock was installed in the steeple of the Pawtucket Congregational

Church in 1828, paid for by a public subscription campaign. A contemporary newspaper account voiced a hope that a clock “in so central and public a situation” would put an end to

“the vexatious confusion” caused by the factory bells ringing out at different times.92 And at least one contemporary witness testified that mill owners lied about the time of day.93 The clock was publicly owned by the subscribers jointly until 1832, when the Pawtucket Congregational Society bought it by paying “those who subscribed towards building it.”94 It seems entirely plausible, but unconfirmable, that building the publicly-owned clock was motivated by a desire to combat the local capitalists’ monopoly on public timekeeping. Whatever the motivation, it certainly had the effect of breaking that monopoly. The clock stood on high ground in the midst of the village mills, across the river from the Slater Mills. It would have been visible and/or audible to most of

Pawtucket’s factory workers.

92 The Pawtucket Chronicle, “Town Clock,” The Chronicle, October 18, 1828, Churches: Pawtucket Congregational #4, Pawtucket Public Library. 93 David Benedict, “Reminiscences,” Pawtucket Gazette and Chronicle, June 10, 1853. Cited in “The Clock Struck A Time Revolution,” Pawtucket Times, December 31, 1975, Bicentennial Edition edition, Churches: Pawtucket Congregational #4, Pawtucket Public Library; and Kulik, “Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island” note 67. 94 “Pawtucket Congregational Society (Original Book)” (Pawtucket, RI, 1832), Pawtucket Congregational Church Records, 1828–2009, Congregational Library and Archive; Squire French et. al., “To Mr. Ellis Clarke, of the Pawtucket Congregational Society,” June 26, 1832, Churches: Pawtucket Congregational #4, Pawtucket Public Library; Betty Johnson, “Dear Mrs. Cheare,” May 13, 1985, Churches: Pawtucket Congregational #4, Pawtucket Public Library. 61

The mechanics of Fall River Massachusetts formed an association sometime before late

April 1844. Members of the association made a pledge that no member should work for more than 10 hours, and erected a Mechanics’ Bell to enforce the pledge. This, as one would expect, lead to conflict with local employers. In May of 1844 a local firm fired all of its mechanics on the grounds that they would not employ them on the schedule dictated by the Mechanics’ Bell.95

Another firm (according to the Mechanics) worked their employees over ten hours per day and, fearing that the workers would leave off once the 6pm bell had rung, watched them closely for the work time beyond 6pm in what may have been a tense standoff.96 If the accounts in The

Mechanic are credible, the association was generally successful in creating and enforcing a 10-hour workday by means of its bell, and its membership did indeed work only 10 hours a day, 30 years before it became Massachusetts state law.97

There may well have been more Mechanics’ Bells that we do not know of. The fact that the shipwrights in New York called their bell a Mechanics’ Bell rather than a Shipwrights’ Bell as may seem more logical given their occupation suggests that the term may not have been their original invention. They may have adopted the term from somewhere else. And since the words

‘Mechanics’ Bell’ aren’t actually used in any of the Pawtucket documents, that clock is a poor candidate for the birthplace of the term. The existence of additional Mechanics’ Bells seem likely.

But whether there were three such bells in the 1830s and ‘40s or more, each of them testifies to workers’ perceptions that control over the means of representing and communicating the time of day was an important goal. And whether the workers were responding to clock-aided time theft

95 “[Untitled],” The Mechanic, May 25, 1844, Microfilm. 96 “[Untitled],” The Mechanic, May 18, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm. 97 “[Untitled],” The Mechanic, May 4, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm; P., “Mr. Almy,” The Mechanic, June 8, 1844, 1 edition, Microfilm. 62 as in Pawtucket or to the sorts of abuse potential in a sunrise to sunset labor regime, the ground on which labor was to be contested between capitalists and laborers was time.

Taken together, the decidedly uneventful shift from day-units to hour-units in industrial labor accounting; the construction of Mechanics’ Bells; and the advent of watchmen and overseers and their attendant technologies of time-recorder, stop watch, workman’s time recorder, time book, and time table all speak to a temporal regime in the nineteenth-century northeastern United States economy in which time was a measured and standardized unit in business practice. And the way this seems to have been most clearly established in business practice, at least at the spatial and conceptual scale of the workplace, was through the translation of time into the medium of labor and the creation of ‘labor time.’ In other words, labor was in this period decidedly a thing that was measured and objectified as a duration. Labor was, as

Marx would say in the 1860s, a thing outside of the laborer. It was an object which the laborer produced and with which he could interact, for instance through its alienation. This satisfied the fundamental precondition for a techno-politics of labor time. And chapters two and three will demonstrate that related forces were simultaneously coalescing in other nineteenth century arenas, no doubt in part thanks to developments in the industrial workplace. These workplace conditions and organizing principles were key. As Mitchell argues, the techno-politics of expertise requires a space of objectification, and an alienation of object from subject.98 The nineteenth century workplace paved the way for an extension and formalization of techno-politics at the turn of the century.

98 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 15. 63

Chapter 2: The Human System

“If that time shall ever come which the prophets have predicted, and saints have hoped and prayed for, when swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks, it will come, not mainly though the ministrations of any gospel, but chiefly through the agency of commerce, enlarged and elevated by the discoveries of new physical facts, and new conceptions of the adaptation of such facts to the wants and service of man.” —Chauncey Smith, speech given at the banquet of the Commercial Club of Boston (1888)1

It is important to avoid the pitfall of thinking of early-nineteenth century US cities as disordered because they did not have centralized police, fire, or ambulance departments, or municipal bureaucracies for the management of public health, sanitation, housing, or schools. A variety of institutions, including churches, volunteer fire companies, and temperance societies, helped communities organize and govern themselves. But in the 1820s, cities started to experience what Beniger would call “crises of control,” in this case the destabilization of community self-governance structures too rapidly for alternative structures to replace them.2

Urbanization and industrialization led to a rapid expansion in the geographic footprint and population of American cities. Cities not only became physically larger but, as land values were driven up in urban areas, geographic specialization between residential, commercial, and

1 Chauncey Smith, “The Commercial Value of Ideas and Physical Facts: An Address Delivered before the Commercial Club of Boston, January 21, 1888,” in Bulletin of the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, vol. 18 (Boston, 1888), 146. 2 James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard University Press, 1986), 6–7. 64 industrial uses also intensified. As Johnson writes, starting in the 1820s cities became both bigger and “much more structurally complex.”3

There was nothing inevitable about the way that cities would respond to these challenges, despite what observers later in the century might have thought.4 How they did, in fact, respond was shaped by what Amy Greenberg calls “a new ideal of citizenship” and “the fall of republican ideals of citizenship and the rise of the businessman, the family, and reform politics in the mid- nineteenth century.”5 The republican ideal of decentralized power and participatory self- governance, she argues, began to give way to a liberal capitalist concept of the division of labor, and the specialization of members within social groups. As the professions generally set themselves apart from the rest of the public and claimed specialized knowledge, the tasks of community protection from fire and crime (and later other services) also became the domains of professionals, hired by the larger community for that purpose. And by the close of the nineteenth century, most major US cities were managed in large part by career technocrats, able to shield themselves from both the public and bitterly contested urban party politics. They were, as one historian points out, loyal to their professional communities above all.6

The rise of the professions generally in the nineteenth century is beyond the scope of the current study, but we can and will consider certain time-based surveillance and regulatory technologies installed within US cities starting in the 1850s and the ways in which they both assumed an objectified construct of time and simultaneously helped make such objectified time

3 David R Johnson, “Police and Fire Protection,” Encyclopedia of American Social History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 2169. 4 US Bureau of the Census, Municipal Electric Fire Alarm and Police Patrol Systems, 1912, http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/13472615ch3.pdf. 5 Amy S Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 15. 6 Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 133. 65 into reality. Out of the many and varied technologies called forth to respond to the ‘crisis’ in urban control facing mid-century cities, this chapter will focus on intraurban telegraph systems.

Intraurban telegraphy constitutes a privileged site for the examination of the objectification of time because it connects materially with the surveillance, measurement, and control practices of the industrial factory. One of the primary applications of intraurban telegraphy in the mid- to late-nineteenth century was to refine the employee and watchman monitoring systems developed in the 1860s. The electric burglar alarm and the electric time detector brought with them the ability to register negligence in real-time and remotely. They even allowed for the entire monitoring process to be outsourced for the first time. The intraurban telegraph also allowed the same technologies and processes to be brought into the domestic sphere. The chapter does not argue that the disciplinary regime of the factory, with its watchmen’s keys and time books, was simply exported to the communities and homes outside the factory gates. But the two were certainly related and developed in conversation with each other.

Intraurban telegraphy includes a varied but related set of technologies and products. It includes municipal fire alarms, burglar alarms, time distribution systems, watchmen services, and messenger services. In many cases, a single company marketed several or all of these services simultaneously. In some cases they were bundled together: this was often the case with time distribution, burglar alarm, and watchman services; and with alarm services and messenger services. A diffuse but recognizable cadre of inventor-operators, machinists, and experienced mechanics constituted what Paul Israel has called a “technical community” that incubated new ideas and helped reduce them to practice.7 This technical community also apparently drew on a common set of capitalists to finance experiments and commercialize devices.

7 Paul Israel, From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 87–120. 66

One is tempted to call urban telegraphy an industry, but the term does not adequately capture the non-corporate research dimension of urban telegraphy. Corporate research and development departments are more a feature of the twentieth century. The term technical community seems to suffer from a different difficulty: it centers the researchers and developers to the seeming exclusion of the capitalists, less-skilled workers, and consumers that were integral to the development of intraurban telegraphic systems. For these reasons the chapter will make use of the term ‘cluster’ as a shorthand way of referring to all the varied activities—invention, investment, employment, consumption, and use—and actors that directly contributed to the intraurban telegraph system in whatever way. To re-state, for the purposes of casting the net broadly and construing the phenomena under study liberally, urban telegraphy is analyzed as neither an industry nor a technical community but a cluster of activities and individuals.

We are fortunate to have several extant histories of nineteenth century municipal fire departments, some of which give greater or less attention to their alarm systems.8 One can also find some historical works on private security, including alarm security, but the political and historical implications of time-based monitoring systems have been often treated summarily in them, if at all.9 There is a valuable literature around municipal time standardization, both in the

8 William Werner, History of the Boston Fire Department and Boston Fire Alarm System: January 1, 1859 through December 31, 1973 (Boston: The Boston Sparks Association, 1974), http://www.bostonsparks.com/bookV1/; Charles E White, The Providence Fireman (Providence, R.I.: E.L. Freeman & Son, 1886); Franklin C Clark, “History of the Providence Fire Department” (Providence, 1905), Franklin C Clark papers, Rhode Island Historical Society, Mfilm TH 9504.R4 C37; Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City. 9 Milton Lipson, On Guard: The Business of Private Security (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1975); William Greer, A History of Alarm Security, 2nd edition (National Burglar & Fire Alarm Association, 1991); Karen C S Donnelly, “Domestic Security: The Holmes Burglar Alarm Telegraph, 1853-1876” (Masters Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1992), http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1514&context=hp_theses. 67

US and elsewhere, but it often doesn’t place itself in explicit conversation with fire alarm systems and burglar alarm systems.10 This chapter will hopefully suggest some of the results of doing so.

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It didn’t take long in the history of the telegraph for some inventors to realize the potential usefulness of telegraphy for communication within cities as opposed to between them.

Telegraphy promised to make the city safer, more orderly, and more rational. The New York

Times sarcastically quipped that the only people who would be harmed by intraurban telegraphy were the flunkies of the political machines that seemed to infest city administration.11 The testing ground for the system was to be firefighting.

There are a few reasons why firefighting might have been chosen by the boosters of urban telegraphy as its demonstration case. Most directly, information about fires is highly time sensitive. Small durations could have serious consequences for both property and human life, unlike most other types of information in the mid-nineteenth century United States. Another factor was that, by the 1850s, the existing fire protection system was coming in for increasingly loud criticism. Most cities relied on volunteer fire companies to put out fires and these masculinist and prideful institutions had come to be seen as violent and unruly, and morally and politically suspect by increasingly large swaths of the public over the course of the 1840s and ‘50s.12 At the same time that the telegraph was being practically demonstrated, then, there was popular pressure, as well as political incentive for city administrators, to transition to professional fire

10 Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford University Press, 2000); Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2013). 11 “City Intelligence: The American Fire-Alarm and Police Telegraph,” The New York Times, April 25, 1860, sec. News, http://www.nytimes.com/1860/04/25/news/city-intelligence-american-fire-alarm- police-telegraph-fulton-street-prayer.html. 12 Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City; Johnson, “Police and Fire Protection.” 68 departments. A telegraphic fire alarm system was seen by many on both sides of the debate as a technology conducive to centralization and hierarchical re-organization.13 That fact, and the entrenchment of the volunteer fire companies in the urban fabric, may help explain the initial slowness with which the system was adopted. Lastly, given the logistical complexity of responding rapidly and efficiently to a fire, firefighting served as an excellent and politically benign venue to test out the theories and technologies of intraurban telegraphy.

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In 1845 a physician from a prominent Boston family named William F Channing wrote a letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser proposing a municipal telegraph network that could be used to communicate fire alarms.14 Modern scholar Karen C S Donnelly has suggested that Channing might have begun contemplating a municipal fire alarm telegraph system as early as 1839.15 But the key technological breakthrough that allowed for the development of the fire alarm telegraph wouldn’t come until 1846.

What was needed was the ability to cause mechanical motion at a distance by transmitting an electrical impulse. Moses G. Farmer, a lifelong tinkerer from New Hampshire, was the first to achieve this. Farmer was a jack of all trades; at different times he worked as a civil engineer, school headmaster, piano tuner, organist, and telegraph operator. In 1846, two years after Morse’s successful demonstration of the electromagnetic telegraph for intercity communication, Farmer made a small and gimmicky railcar in his backyard in Portsmouth. It was a toy, seen by himself and his neighbors as a novelty, but it ran on electricity. He got a job as a telegraph operator with the Boston and Worcester Telegraph Company on or before

13 David O. Woodbury, “The Fire Alarm Man,” New-England Galaxy 7, no. 2 (September 1965): 21–30. 14 Bartky, Selling the True Time, 50–51. 15 Donnelly, “Domestic Security: The Holmes Burglar Alarm Telegraph, 1853-1876,” 15. 69

December 1847.16 The president of that company, FOJ Smith, asked Farmer to design a bell- striking apparatus that used electromagnetism, which he did successfully within a week, but apparently Smith had already moved on from the idea and was uninterested.17

It is unclear whether Farmer knew of Channing’s vision of a fire alarm telegraph. It’s also unclear when and how the two men met, but in 1851 they partnered to develop the nation’s first telegraphic fire alarm system in Boston, with a grant from the City.18 It seems to be a matter of some contention which man should get the kudos for the effort, but the focus on identifying a solitary genius is probably misplaced and reflects an overly individualistic impression of how complex technical systems are invented.19

For Channing, at least, the telegraph promised to bring a level of order to the city that had been unrealizable up until that point. Channing analogized the city to the human body, and in his analogy the telegraph became the central nervous system. Importantly, the analogy of the telegraph as a central nervous system for the city required both its ability to receive information and its ability to affect mechanical action at a distance. This emphasis was not similarly shared in other, perhaps less literal, analogies of intercity telegraph communication to nervous systems. For

Channing the telegraph was a technology with multiple potentialities and implications. It was a system for the coordination of rational and efficient responses, for the aggregation of information, and for the management of the muscles and organs of the city. Some of his words, written in

16 James D Reid, The Telegraph in America: Its Founders, Promoters, and Noted Men (New York: Derby Brothers, 1879), 370–371. 17 This anecdote is from Woodbury, “The Fire Alarm Man,” 26; FOJ Smith was apparently quite a notorious figure in his day. He was also one of the first licensees of the Morse patent. See Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (Harvard University Press, 1994). 18 Reid, The Telegraph in America, 372. 19 Israel gives a compelling historical critique of the popular notion of the solitary nineteenth century inventor. See, especially, Israel, From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory, 20–21. 70

1851 before the Boston system was physically in place, are provocative, and worth quoting at length:

The Electric Telegraph in its common use, or as commonly regarded, is an agency for the transmission of intelligence or impressions to a distance. In this its functions are analogous to the sensitive nerves of the animal system. The Electric Telegraph, especially in its Municipal uses, may superadd to this the production of important mechanical effects, either by its own electromagnetic energy, or by calling into action other machinery. The analogy here with the functions of the motor nerves and apparatus of the animal system is equally strict and important. In any system of Municipal organization in which it is attempted to supply a living bond by means of the Telegraph, the distinction between these functions must be recognized; and in any system in which it is desired to employ both of these, to obtain unity of action from a variety of parts, it is necessary that the analogy furnished by the animal system, should be preserved in the relation of these functions. In other words there should be a Centre to which all impressions from the circumference or extremes should first be conveyed over one set of conductors, and from which after an act of intelligence, the impulses to corresponding action should proceed over another. Here is the brain and nervous system of the animal or of man. The Telegraph when employed for any office of social organization of a high order must conform to the same analogy.20

In late 1851, when Channing wrote the description of a municipal fire alarm telegraph quoted above, the City of Boston had already begun construction on the world’s first municipal fire alarm telegraph. One commentator, writing in 1864, after the municipal fire alarm telegraph had become an established feature of several coastal cities, claimed that it was the human nervous system itself (which Channing would have been familiar with as a physician) that suggested to him the organization of his future telegraph network.21 He never admitted that provenance for his idea explicitly, but it is easy to see where the theory might come from.

But for Channing, one of the municipal telegraph’s prominent early promoters, fire alarm signaling wasn’t the end of the municipal telegraph in and of itself. Rather, it merely provided an excellent venue for developing and experimenting with municipal telegraph systems. Responding

20 William F Channing, “On the Municipal Electric Telegraph; Especially in Its Application to Fire Alarms,” American Journal of Science and Arts (1820-1879) 13, no. 37 (1852): 60. 21 “The Fire Alarm and Police Telegraph,” The Telegrapher, October 31, 1864, Vol 1 edition, Hathi Trust. 71 to an active fire required the coordination of many individuals and pieces of equipment, sometimes coming from different directions. The logistical problems became only more complex if there was more than one fire happening at a time. And, obviously, fires had to be responded to promptly. As Channing put it in an 1854 lecture before the Smithsonian Institution in

Washington, “The first ten minutes in directing the alarm is worth hours afterwards.”22

For Channing, the telegraph wires were to be the “arteries” of the “body politic,” connecting people into an organic whole that would be able to know more and do more inasmuch as it was able to centralize information and coordinate action. Channing thought this required that the system have a central station (or “brain”) to harmonize the actions of dispersed agents with each other and with a sort of immaterial, scientific rationality. At the limit, he even suggested that the telegraph network was incrementally introducing the millennium.23 And he was not alone in the tone and tenor of some of his commentary. The editor of the Railway Times, an industry publication for railroad employees, called the telegraphic fire alarm “a higher system of municipal organization than any which has heretofore been proposed or adopted. In it the

New World has taken a step in the forms of civilization in advance of the Old.”24

Telegraphic fire alarms quickly spread to numerous cities across North America, as the charts below show. New York City employed an electric telegraph system for the purposes of issuing fire alarms from 1847 but, for various reasons, Boston’s 1852 system is considered the proper first. The New York system, built between 1847 and 1853 by Hugh Downing and Royal

E House was unsophisticated and lacked several key features first introduced in Boston in 1852 and subsequently copied by all other fire alarm systems. It lacked signal boxes, printing

22 William F Channing, “The American Fire-Alarm Telegraph” (Lecture, Smithsonian Institution, 1854). 23 Ibid., 148. 24 “The Electric Fire Alarm: Prescott’s Electric Telegraph,” Railway Times, August 11, 1860. It might be worth noting here that the comment about the New World taking a step in advance of the Old World was made by Channing himself in 1855, and appears to have been copied into the article just cited. 72

capabilities, and a central station to dispatch a response and consisted of a single circuit.25 New

York, perhaps suffering from an unwillingness to scrap its own 1847 system, was ultimately one

of the later major cities to adopt the modernized fire alarm system on the Channing-Farmer

model.

Municipal Telegraphic Fire Alarm Systems in North America

1844 1846 1848 1850 1852 1854 1856 1858 1860 1862 1864 1866 1868 1870 1872 1874

Figure 5. It is difficult to find a single source with dates for multiple cities’ systems. While the Census Bureau clearly had this information, their published reports did not include it. This chart shows only some of the telegraphic fire alarm systems installed during this timeframe, as can be confirmed in figures 2 and 3. It is meant to give the reader a sense of when some major North American cities adopted the system. I have inserted the 1847 date for New York’s first system, but otherwise the data is from William Werner, History of the Boston Fire Department and Boston Fire Alarm System: January 1, 1859 through December 31, 1973 (Boston: The Boston Sparks Association, 1974), p226.

25 Greer, A History of Alarm Security, 16–18. 73 Fire Alarm System Installations per Year, USA

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

Figure 6. US Bureau of the Census, Municipal Electric Fire Alarm and Police Patrol Systems, 1912, http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/13472615ch3.pdf.

Fire Alarm Systems in Operation, USA

900

800

700

600

500

400

300

200

100

0

Figure 7. The dates of some of the major cities listed in figure 1 have been imposed onto this chart to help the reader place those cities in context. As figure 3 shows, these cities were some of the earliest adopters of the system overall. Most of the largest cities had telegraphic systems in place by the end of the 1860s, and over 700 smaller cities adopting the system before the end of the nineteenth century. US Bureau of the Census, Municipal Electric Fire Alarm and Police Patrol Systems, 1912, http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/13472615ch3.pdf.

74

The municipal telegraphic fire alarm system consisted of a number of stations placed throughout the city and connected to central stations. A station was a box, about two feet in height and width and perhaps a foot deep. It could either be fixed to the wall of an existing structure or placed on a post at chest-level on the sidewalk. They usually had a locked door.

Certain members of the fire and police departments, some local business owners or clergymen, and maybe a few property owners in the vicinity of the box would have had keys to the door.

One of these community leaders (or government officials) would have had to have been fetched to unlock the door. Inside was an incredibly simple mechanism: a crank attached to a cog-wheel with irregular teeth.26 When the crank was turned, the cog wheel would spin, closing or opening a circuit (depending on the design) as the teeth came into contact with a receiver. The number and spacing of teeth on the cog wheel corresponded to dots and dashes, representing the number of the district the station was in, and the number of the station within that district. The telegraphic message would be transmitted to the central station, which was an office, where it would cause a bell to ring, alerting the watchman on duty of an incoming alarm. The telegraphic sounder key in the office would tap out the message for the operator to dictate, but the message would also be registered as a series of pencil markings or indentations on a strip of paper in case the watchman was woken up by the bell and slow to bring his attention to the receiver apparatus.

The central station operator marked the exact time of the alarm in his book and then sounded the alarm across the system by depressing a key on a keyboard. This keyboard, also by means of a code wheel, would send electrical impulses through the circuits to which it was connected. These circuits, which were alarm circuits, were different from those used to

26 Channing loved to point out that the station boxes were so simple a child or ‘ignorant person’ could use them. But a child or ‘ignorant person’ would not have been able to unlock them unaided in the first place because they wouldn’t have had a key. See Channing, “On the Municipal Electric Telegraph; Especially in Its Application to Fire Alarms,” 67; Channing, “The American Fire-Alarm Telegraph.” 75 communicate with the boxes. The alarm circuits connected to bells, gongs, air whistles, or other sounding devices and the powerful electromagnetic pulse sent by the central office caused the striking mechanisms of these sounders to move, striking their bell or gong. Thus all the bells in the city—or in some subarea of the city if, like Boston, it was divided up into alarm districts— would strike in near-perfect unison with each other and with the pulses provided by the central station’s code wheel. Rounds of four peels of the bell, separated by intervals of silence and repeated, indicated that the fire was in the fourth fire district and directed firefighters to that area of the city.

Directing firefighters to the exact box from which the alarm originated was slightly more complicated. One version involved the bells ringing out an alternating pattern: district number— box number—district number—box number. Another model had the box number sent through the signaling circuit, causing the telegraphic sounders in all the boxes on the circuit to simultaneously tap out the number being transmitted by the central station. Firefighters and curious onlookers would have crowded around one of these boxes and listened to hear the exact location of the fire.

It was possible for end-users at the boxes to communicate with the central station if they were knowledgeable in Morse code, as a telegraph key was provided in addition to the crank.

Firefighters and police officers could use the telegraph key to signal to the central station “all clear” or to communicate other information peculiar to the situation. But, overall, the system was not designed for point-to-point communication between users but communication to and from the central station.

By the end of the 1860s intraurban telegraph wires were a feature of every major US city.

With these systems now in place and demonstrating their workability, it became a question how else would cities make use of the new technologies to re-organize themselves. 76

From the beginning, it seems, there was an awareness of the potential to distribute time signals via telegraph. Channing stated as much in 1851when he urged the immediate adoption by cities of the “beautiful chronometric application of the Telegraph, by which a single clock registers its time on an indefinite number of dials throughout a city.”27 The infrastructure for fire alarm signals would not have been appropriate for the direct and continuous clock synchronization Channing is referring to, but the new systems were used to distribute time signals aurally. In Boston, for instance, some time between 1852 and 1860 a chronometer was placed into the fire alarm circuit so that it could cause a bell to strike every day at noon.28 Providence began installing its own municipal alarm telegraph in 1860, bringing it online in July 1862. From the very beginning its operating procedure included a 9 o’clock time signal to be tapped into all of the boxes.29 But it was only with the emergence of telegraphic burglar alarm companies that standard time was delivered through municipal telegraphs as a product piped directly to any home and workplace that desired it.

+ + +

Intraurban telegraphy didn’t only bring new methods of mechanical synchronization and central direction to the public spaces of US cities: it also brought them into bourgeois domestic spaces. One important synchronizing technology, mechanical clocks, had long been domesticated by the mid-nineteenth century. Their ownership was much less rare than it had been earlier in the century, or in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. As mentioned in

Chapter 1, even some working class people owned mechanical clocks in the mid-nineteenth century. They were not, however, part of larger technical networks. The owner could roughly approximate synchronicity with public timepieces only by listening to the church, factory, or

27 Channing, “On the Municipal Electric Telegraph; Especially in Its Application to Fire Alarms,” 83. 28 “The Electric Fire Alarm: Prescott’s Electric Telegraph.” 29 Clark, “History of the Providence Fire Department,” 118, Mfilm TH 9504.R4 C37. 77 tower bell and adjusting his or her clock or watch accordingly. After the marriage of telegraphy and burglar alarm technology, however, synchronized and synchronizing technologies entered the home in a markedly different way. They brought the home into larger synchronous networks.

If, as Marx said, the production system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led market relations to impose themselves into family relations, intraurban telegraphic burglar alarms brought outside agents and market relations home in an entirely more tangible way.30 The telegraphic burglar alarm subjected the domestic space to remote supervision by a central station, even if that supervision was seen as benign or beneficial to the householder(s).

In 1853 Augustus R Pope was a reverend in Sommerville, Massachusetts, on the edge of the great telegraph hub that was Boston in the 1840s and ‘50s. He seems to have had a hobbyist’s interest in the idea of an electromagnetic burglar alarm and he spent much of his free time developing his invention between 1850 and 1852. In 1853 he was issued a patent for a device consisting of electrical contacts on doors and windows connected to a bell with an electromagnetic striking mechanism. When a door or window was opened, it would complete a circuit with the contacts on the door or window, causing electricity provided by a battery to flow through an electromagnet, causing a lever to strike the bell repeatedly until the circuit was broken again.31 The system was electric and used the same kind of wires that a telegraphic system would use, but it lacked the municipal scale. The bell was placed in the homeowner’s bedroom and the wires served to communicate across the house, not across the city. Not much happened with the patent until 1857, when a man named Edwin Holmes bought it.

30 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx/Engels Selected Works, trans. Samuel Moore, vol. One (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 98–137. 31 Augustus R Pope, Improvement in electro-magnetic alarms, 9802 (Sommerville, MA, filed October 27, 1852, and issued June 21, 1853), https://patents.google.com/patent/US9802A/en?q=augustus+r+pope. 78

Holmes was a fellow Massachusetts Yankee, born in West Boylston in 1820 to an upper- middle class family. He had moved to Boston in 1849, opening up a store with his brother. They sold thread, needle, yarn and metal hoops for ladies’ skirts.32 When he met Pope in 1857 he had no particular experience in selling electric devices, but he was located on Tremont Row in

Boston, less than a thousand feet from Hinds & Williams, one of the first shops to manufacture electrical instruments in the United States. Williams’s shop was also a frequent haunt of Moses

Farmer the co-developer (with Channing) of the telegraphic fire alarm system.33

After purchasing Pope’s patent, in 1858, Holmes started the first electrical burglar alarm company in the United States: the Holmes Burglar Alarm Company.34 Finding business slow in

Boston he relocated to New York, finally bringing his wife and children to join him there in

1859.

For the next decade Holmes would dedicate himself to installing electrical burglar alarms in wealthy households. It is not known how much it cost to have a Holmes burglar alarm but, based on the list of subscribers Holmes used in his advertising materials, it was likely very expensive. During the 1860s one of the important developments that took place was the integration of a clock into the alarm system. The clock was used, initially, to automatically engage the alarm system at a determined time of night and disengage it once again in the morning. That way, the comings and goings of early-rising domestic servants would not trigger the bell to ring in the master’s bedroom. Some time in this period the system was made more sophisticated with the addition of bells in the servants’ quarters that could be used by the master

32 Edwin Thomas Holmes, A Wonderful Fifty Years: By Edwin T. Holmes, President Holmes Electric Protective Co., New York (Priv. pub. [Watkins Press], 1917), 11–14. 33 Ibid., 14. 34 Greer, A History of Alarm Security, 25. 79 to summon them remotely or, in tandem with the system’s clock, as a wake-up alarm to get the servants out of bed.35

The usefulness of this system for regulation and surveillance specifically with regard to time was noted by users. In 1861 Holmes published a lengthy advertisement in the Brooklyn Daily

Times containing dozens of customer testimonials in both first and third person. Several testimonials hailed the system specifically as a time-regulating tool. One customer, we are told in a third-person testimonial, was able, thanks to the system, to tell his servant “you need not tell me when you got up. I know just what time it was.”36 Another said, “It is a great family regulator, all know that they must be in their places at my bed time.”37 Yet a third said, “Now I know how long the young gentlemen stay with my daughters.”38 It is probable that these testimonials were stylized by Holmes, or even fabricated entirely. They have a markedly different tone from the first-person testimonials, which are attributed to the usually well-known individuals who gave them. Those testimonials, from important capitalists of New York and other nearby cities, praise the technology for the peace of mind it gives them and do not overtly flaunt its re-entrenchment of their patriarchal power over their families and servants. Nonetheless, this doesn’t change the fact that Holmes clearly thought that household regulation, especially in terms of time usage, was a major selling point of the product and had reason to think that his customers would identify with such narratives. One of them, certainly the most fanciful of them all, is particularly revealing. It purports to be the statement “always” made to Holmes by the female household servants in his subscribers’ homes. With deliberately poor grammar and spelling to mimic the

35 Holmes, A Wonderful Fifty Years, 20. 36 Edwin Holmes, “A Treatise Upon the Best Method of Protecting Property from Burglars, and Human Life from Midnight Assassins (from Brooklyn Daily Times, 1861),” in Domestic Security: The Holmes Burglar Alarm Telegraph, 1853-1876, by Karen C S Donnelly (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1992), 57, http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1514&context=hp_theses. 37 Ibid., 58. 38 Ibid. 80 sound of a lower-class person’s speech, Holmes has ‘the Bridgets’ complain that the device makes sneaking off and shirking responsibilities totally impossible.39 Another advertisement, this one from Holmes’s Philadelphia franchisee, proclaimed that the Holmes burglar alarm “tells you about the ins and outs of your servants. … It tells you the hour your sons come home at night— also the hour your daughter closes and locks the door. The entire household is regulated by this

Telegraph.”40

The home was becoming both a site of patriarchal surveillance and capitalist control. As class distinctions became firmer, it appears that middle and upper class women were less likely to perform domestic labor themselves and increasingly relied on paid domestic servants whom they were expected to supervise.41 According to historian Faye Dudden, both work-discipline and surveillance were mediated through the new factory idea of labor time. This allowed for a constant surveillance: the mistress of the house could tell on sight whether her domestic was working or not, and did not need to go from room to room checking to see whether they were clean enough yet. Yet another parallel between the factory and the bourgeois home allegedly

‘outside the market’ was the creation of a body of housekeeping expertise designed to allow women who had never performed domestic labor themselves to supervise those who did. Dudden compares the deliberate separation of knowledge of a labor activity from its practice, the social mandate for middle and upper class women to supervise their domestic servants, and the time- based system of management to scientific management but, when read alongside

39 Ibid., 59. 40 T E Cornish, “Save Yourselves from Robbery! [Advertisement],” in Domestic Security: The Holmes Burglar Alarm Telegraph, 1853-1876, by Karen C S Donnelly (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1992), 232–33, http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1514&context=hp_theses. We don’t have a date for this advertisement but, based on the content of the text, it probably was written between 1870 and 1872. 41 Faye E Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 156. 81 contemporaneous developments in factories, cities, and private homes it seems very much a product of the nineteenth century as much as it is reminiscent of the twentieth.42 The organizational technologies and protocols of the factory—based as they were on a certain mode of representing labor as a measure of duration of human activity—were simultaneously being articulated and shaped in a variety of societal institutions. The domestic servant was, increasingly, becoming analogous to the factory operative as workers similarly subject to control in the workplace.

All that being said, the term ‘telegraph’ was being slightly stretched to include burglar alarm technology at this point in its development. While telegraphing electric impulses from room to room in a house was a real form of telegraphy, and a real technology of surveillance and regulation, a more sophisticated version of this system would soon place more information over a wider area under the gaze of the system operator. The ideological and commercial impulses that drove the alarm industry thus far would continue to propel it to higher levels of technological complexity in its second decade.

The central station model for telecommunications that originated with the municipal fire alarm telegraph made its way into the private security industry in 1871, when another

Massachusetts-born inventor, Edward A Calahan, filed for a patent for an improvement in

“district and fire-alarm telegraphs.”43 Less than two months after filing for the patent Calahan had organized, with the help of George Walker and Charles Smith of the Gold and Stock

Telegraph Company, the American District Telegraph Company in New York City.

The American District Telegraph Company operated on the central office principle, but at a small spatial scale. Each district, only sixteen square city blocks, had its own central office.

42 Ibid., 174–175. 43 Edward A Calahan, Improvement in district and fire-alarm telegraphs, US127844 A, issued June 11, 1872, http://www.google.com/patents/US127844. 82

The boxes, like the fire alarm signal boxes in the Channing-Farmer system, used code wheels.44

Unlike the Channing-Farmer signal boxes, however, the American District Telegraph boxes could request a number of different services: the box could be used to summon a messenger, firefighter, police officer, or physician. In some variants, the menu options were indicated by the number of times the code wheel was turned—once for a messenger, twice for a firefighter, etc.45

In other, probably later models, the box might have including a mechanism for selecting among a few different code wheels, each of which had its own unique, consecutive number and communicating a different request.46 The districts were designed to be small so that a messenger could run from the central office to the customer’s house in three minutes or less.47

The American District Telegraph Company also sold domestic alarm systems similar to the ones offered by Holmes. The key difference between the products of Holmes and of

American District was that the latter placed the bells in a central office, similar to how fire alarm systems were organized, rather than in the owner’s bedroom. This had a couple key advantages.

One advantage is that it made a call for outside help an automatic part of the alarm apparatus.

The earlier Holmes system gave the homeowner the opportunity to personally respond to the burglar or home invader, but did not trigger a response by a police force (unless a police officer was close enough to actually hear the alarm bell). This obviously made it a less successful deterrent than a central office alarm system backed with the force of a private police patrol. The other key advantage to keep in mind is that it allowed the property to be monitored when no one

44 Ibid. 45 “The American District Telegraph Company,” The Telegraphic Journal 1, no. 17 (October 15, 1873): 297–98. 46 Greer, A History of Alarm Security, 29. For example, box n could have gears numbered n, n+1, n+2, and n+3, where each of these numbers indicated a different service requested at box n. To avoid confusion with the next closest box, they would have had to separate the box numbers such that the next box’s number was n+4. 47 Reid, The Telegraph in America, 634. 83 was present. If the homeowner was away on business or vacation, for instance, he could notify the central office to respond to all door or window openings for the expected duration of his travels. It also allowed, and this is a key transformation, the monitoring of commercial property outside of business hours without the physical presence of a watchman.

The American District Telegraph thus initiated remote site surveillance, aided by telegraphic circuits connected into a central office network. Within its first few years of operation, certainly before 1879, American District Telegraph also added a night watch service to its portfolio. This was a redundant service, given the remote burglar alarm system mentioned above.

But it did allow cautious customers an added degree of security. While the central office could dispatch patrolmen to respond to an alarm, there was obviously no substitute for having a man onsite to defend the property without delay. And, as alluded to in Chapter 1, this included yet another important development in the history of workplace surveillance: A watchman on a customer’s premises was required to send a signal to the central office at frequent intervals. The principle is similar to that of the keys used with the watchman’s time register. The time register, combined with the keys, ensured that the watchman was awake and making his prescribed rounds at the prescribed times throughout the night.48 Unlike the old mechanical time registers, however, telegraphic communication with the central office meant near–real-time monitoring of the watchman on duty. Failure to report to a prescribed station at the prescribed time would be discovered at the moment of delinquency, not the next morning when the supervisor removed the paper strip from the night’s register. And this meant that delinquency could trigger immediate response. A contemporary chronicler of the system said that watchmen from the

48 Alfred Ritter von Urbanitzky, Electricity in the Service of Man: A Popular and Practical Treatise on the Applications of Electricity in Modern Life, ed. and trans. R Wormell (London: Cassell and Company, 1886), https://archive.org/details/electricityinse01wormgoog. 84 central office were “instant[ly]” dispatched to the site in the event of a signal’s non-arrival.49 And the central station watchmen themselves could be mechanically monitored. At least one central station, that of the Boston fire alarm system, was equipped with a watchclock with 72 pins on a rotating disk. Every twenty minutes a single pin would be mechanically released and the watchman could depress it. If he missed his mark the pin would remain fully erect, recording his neglect.50 This provided the system with yet more redundancy and protection from human irregularity. “Thus,” the contemporary witness says, “every year more and more is the telegraph becoming the guardian of our homes and the protector of our property.”51

The Holmes company did not sit on its hands while the American District Telegraph built up its system. Holmes’s company began its own telegraphic alarm service in 1872, around the time of American District’s founding. It also started a central station service in Boston in

1872, under the direction of Holmes’s son Edwin Thomas Holmes. The Holmes company had a presence in Philadelphia starting around this time, but the exact date is unclear.52 The

Providence office was started somewhat later, in 1881.53

The Holmes company specialized in bank vault protection services. Vaults were placed in wooden cabinets with electrical contacts fixed to the doors. The panels of the wooden cabinet were also laced with metal foil on both the outside and the inside. Galvanometers, devices that

49 Reid, The Telegraph in America, 635. 50 Daniel Warren, “History and Description of the Boston Fire Alarm Telegraph,” in A History of Alarm Security, by William Greer, 2nd edition (National Burglar & Fire Alarm Association, 1991), 95–97. 51 Reid, The Telegraph in America, 635. It is a shame that we do not know how strict adherence was to this idealized version of the system. Early historiography on the industrial factory tended to overemphasize the extent to which its operation was regular and uniform with regards to time. It was only as a result of revisionist scholarship using different sources that it became clear that early industrial factories were quite irregular in their operations. One hopes that as the historiography on municipal telegraph systems grows, there will be similar work to complicate and nuance the image of alarm companies as perfectly functioning, instantly responding machines. Unfortunately, much work needs to be done to establish the basics of this history, making further research more difficult at present. See David Brody, “Time and Work during Early American Industrialism,” Labor History 30, no. 1 (January 1989): 34. 52 Holmes, A Wonderful Fifty Years, 44. 53 Greer, A History of Alarm Security, 39. 85 measure the flow of current through an electric circuit, were placed at the central station.

Separating the contacts on the door or tearing the metal foil on the surface of the cabinet would break the circuit or increase its resistance (in the event of a partial tear in the foil), triggering an alarm. At the same time, puncturing the foil from the outside would bring it into contact with the layer of foil on the inside, making a shorter circuit connection with less resistance. This moved the galvanometer’s needle in the opposite direction and also triggered an alarm.54 Similar foil

(deceptively made to appear decorative) was applied to shop windows so that breaking a window would trigger an alarm.

In keeping with the monopolistic tendencies in the electrical industries—telegraph, telephone, stock ticker, lighting, and alarm—in the late-nineteenth century, the Holmes company bought American District’s interests in the burglar alarm business in January 1883. The new corporation, the Holmes Electric Protective Company, owned all the real and intangible assets of the older Holmes Burglar Alarm Company as well as all of the electrical contacts, circuits, machinery of the American District Telegraph Company’s burglar alarm service. It also absorbed American District’s 276-person subscription list. American District continued to exist as a messenger service from 1883, and probably collected rent payments from the Holmes Electric

Protective Co for the use of overhead wires (which it did not sell).55

+ + +

In 1888, for reasons that are unclear, Edwin Holmes sold his interest in his Providence business, causing it to re-incorporate itself as the Rhode Island Electric Protective Company.56

54 I know all this is true, I just need to remember which source to cite… 55 Holmes Electric Protective Company v William Williams, as Commissioner, etc. and others, 142–143 (n.d.). 56 Rhode Island General Assembly, “An Act to Incorporate the Rhode Island Electric Protective Company,” in Acts and Resolves Passed by the General Assembly of the State of Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, at the May Session, 1888. (Providence, RI: E.L. Freeman & Son, 1888), 61–62. 86

This was obviously not the only electric protective company in existence—we have already referenced their existence in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—nor was Providence the only city to have, by the 1880s, both an electric protective company and a fire alarm telegraph system simultaneously in operation. But, hopefully, some brief remarks on the Rhode Island Electric

Protective Company will be useful in suggesting an approximate idea of the nature of the economic cluster centered on the municipal telegraph.

The earliest available advertising material created by the Rhode Island Electric Protective

Company dates from 1891, three years after its incorporation. It consists of an article describing their business method, with the expressed hope that businessmen will read it and become convinced of the soundness of the company’s operations. RIEP had, at that time, about 70 clients including banks, jewelry workshops, and stores. For RIEP, its burglar alarm system was necessarily aligned with the goals of the factory watchman systems described in Chapter 1. Like watchmen, the telegraphic burglar alarm had two simultaneous and equally important goals: protecting property and controlling human irregularity. “We suggest,” they wrote, “that not only is this system the surest of protection against the burglar, but it is an excellent check against several species of dishonesty even with regard to employees in banks, offices and stores.”57 And, same as was discussed above with the American District Telegraph system, the use of clockwork and telegraphy allowed for a secondary level of monitoring for employee negligence: the watchman tracks the workers and the machine tracks the watchman.

Unlike the American District Telegraph system, RIEP went farther in their advertising and offered to provide subscribers with a written report of the exact opening and closing times of their businesses each week, allowing upper management to remotely measure even the tardiness

57 “The Rhode Island Electric Protective Co: Guardian of Our Entrusted Wealth,” Providence Board of Trade Journal, 1891, Rhode Island Historical Society. 87 of the middle-manager responsible for opening and closing the workplace each morning or night.

In the American District system, which came earlier, the person closing or opening the shop would have signaled to the central station that they were doing so (so that the central office could engage or disengage the alarm system as need be), just like in the RIEP system. But in the RIEP system a written report of these signals was provided to the proprietor even if he did not himself send those signals. The company’s own description of the system reveals the interconnectedness of telegraphy, alarm security, and labor surveillance:

When a subscriber is ready to close his store or place of business he notifies the central office, and the man in charge takes the time and enters it in the daily register. If an alarm was to ring in one minute after the vault, safe or store is registered "closed," a delegation of the company's men would visit the place and protect the premises until the cause of the trouble had been ascertained... When the subscriber opens his store, safe or vault in the morning he privately signals the central office and again the time is registered. A list of these opening and closing hours are forwarded to each subscriber once a week, and in this way the employer of labor can keep a strict watch over his subordinates even though he himself may be in another part of the country on pleasure or business.58

It is also clear that the RIEP depended on an explicit association of their products with science and machine-bound consistency. In their advertisements they included such slogans as

“Science is Supreme” and repeatedly pointed out that their system relied not on their watchmen but on the perfection of their galvanometers and indicator dials. It shouldn’t surprise us then that

RIEP also sold time signals through its system, in which it used electrical impulses to synchronize hundreds of dials (aka clock faces) across the city.

58 Ibid. 88

Figure 8. Detail from “The Rhode Island Electric Protective Co: Guardian of Our Entrusted Wealth,” Providence Board of Trade Journal, 1891, Rhode Island Historical Society.

RIEP was just one company, but it was founded as a Holmes company, a shared heritage

with similar companies and corporate subsidiaries from Philadelphia to Boston. Electric

protective companies can be viewed as extreme manifestations of a will to use electricity to re-

order and re-organize urban life in the US. They offered a variety of information and monitoring

products, but the common thread linking them together is an aspiration both utopian and

dystopian, to use electricity to create a more rational social world.

But despite their potency for the historian, they don’t appear to have left significant traces

in the archive. In fact, none of the incorporators of RIEP in 1888 left an archival footprint to

speak of. RIEP wasn’t even mentioned in the obituary of Isaac M Potter, one of the key players

in the formation of the corporation.59 The fact that companies so clearly invested in

documentation and note-taking could have left such a light imprint on the archives is yet a

mystery.60 But, whether successful or not, and whether they were durable or not, electric

59 “Col. Isaac M Potter,” The Providence Journal, December 27, 1902. 60 William Greer, the author of A History of Alarm Security clearly had access to the company records of the Rhode Island Electric Protective Company during the time he was preparing his book. He also interviewed the now-deceased Richard Clark, last president of RIEP and president of the Central Station Alarm Association from 1977 to 1979. Neither Greer nor Clark left easily discoverable traces, and it’s unclear what might have happened to the documents they possessed just 35 years ago. 89 protective companies suggest some of the extremes implicit in the cluster as a whole. And the district telegraph model that they grew out of in the years post-1871 shared many important structural and political characteristics with an undeniably more famous technology: the stock ticker.

90

91

Chapter 3: No Laggards in the Stock Market

“Suspended from various points about the room are charts, tables and diagrams, relating to almost every conceivable subject, the report and forecast of the Signal Service office; the supply of cereals at every market in the civilized world; the movement of breadstuffs and provisions at home and abroad; the cargoes of steam-ships from American, European and East Indian ports; comparative statements of receipts and shipments; and one thousand and one other matters, a knowledge of which may be of interest to members.” —John Philip Quinn, author of Fools of Fortune (1890)1

“Wall Street has been very aptly described as the ‘business pulse of the nation.’ It is that in the very best meaning of the term. As the minute hand on the clock denotes the fractional changes in the hour, so do the fluctuations in the Wall Street markets show the rise and fall of the business temperature of the country.” —Henry Clews, financier and memoirist (1897)2

“Old Father Time is no laggard in the stock-market.” —William Worthington Fowler, financier and memoirist (1870)3

I have been arguing that time became an object amenable to a particular kind of thinking—expert analysis—over the course of the nineteenth century. This claim, while limited for the purposes of this thesis to the realm of economic relations, refers to such a basic aspect of economic life that it cannot be supposed to have been manifested in just one way, on one scale, or in one context. As we have seen, accounting practices at the level of the individual workshop and the control regimes that ordered cities spoke to a figuration of time as a continuous,

1 John Philip Quinn, Fools of Fortune or Gambling and Gamblers (G. L. Howe & Co., 1890), 591–592, http://archive.org/details/FoolsOfFortuneOrGamblingAndGamblers. 2 Henry Clews, “Wall Street: Could We Do Without It?,” in King’s Views of the New York Stock Exchange: A History and Description..., by Moses King (New York: Moses King, 1897), 7. 3 William Worthington Fowler, Ten Years in Wall Street: Or, Revelations of Inside Life and Experience on ’Change... (Hartford, CT: Worthington, Dustin & Co., 1870), 105. 92 quantifiable, and uniformly divisible object. Time-as-object effectively translated human activity into labor (and thence into surplus value), re-ordering both the workshop and the city in ways that facilitated centralized surveillance and control. But re-organization was not confined to the spatial scale of the workplace or the municipality. The same telegraphic technologies that served as forces of centralization in those contexts could centralize operations on markets that crossed and connected cities. This chapter deals with the temporal structure of nineteenth-century New

York City financial markets, especially in regards to the printing telegraph.

It perhaps should not surprise us that the same man, Edward A Calahan, invented two of the intraurban telegraph’s key technologies: the district telegraph system and the telegraphic printer. The same capitalists financed both projects. And, in the United States’ largest financial center, New York, intraurban telegraphy in the late 1860s and early 1870s took two parallel forms in both district telegraphy and central-service-operated stock quotation distribution. One was a tool for ordering the city, the other for ordering the national and international financial market. Indeed, the primary difference in the two technologies in terms of their ordering and synoptic effects was that the telegraphic printer system constituted a system that could scale and spread beyond any one city and become national and international. In the telegraphic printer system New York City and the world were synchronized, and each US city with each other city as well. While scholars have rightly pointed to the railroads and popular notions of timekeeping as forces of synchronicity, financial information systems must be taken seriously as well.

The printing telegraph, often called the stock ticker because of the noise it made, was an information technology that distributed price and volume information from financial exchanges in lower Manhattan to hundreds or thousands of customers, mainly in New York as well.

Because the information it provided could become the basis for trading activity, its value was highly time-dependent. More precisely, its value to the end-user was dependent on the end-user’s 93 perception of the speed with which he (it was usually a man) received the information relative both to the time of the occurrence it recorded and the time the information would be received by other market actors. In the late-nineteenth century the only other information beyond city-limits with a comparable dependence on time of receipt for its value were the 24-hour short-term weather forecasts of the young National Weather Service.4 Before 1870 farmers depended on annually updated almanacs, conventional wisdom, and rule of thumb to predict weather patterns. But despite the novelty of daily information receipts in the rural Midwest of the 1870s, within just a couple years of the start of the National Weather Service farmers had begun to complain that they received the new reports several hours too late for them to be useful.5 Their point was valid: a 24-hour forecast was of little use 12 or 18 hours into the timeframe it predicted, and was totally useless after the 24 hour timeframe had elapsed. The information was only valuable if it was received at the right time.

With financial information it was a little more complicated. Unlike a 24-hour forecast, the time-value of which decays at a fairly predictable rate, the rate of decay in the time-value of financial information depends on whether other market participants are able to act on the information faster than you or not. Obviously, the people on the floor of the exchange at the moment of a transaction saw it instantly. The first loss in value for the information, then, pertained to the lag between when people on the floor saw the trade and when it came through on the ticker tape. The second loss in value was based on (1) whether rivals also had ticker machines, (2) whether they subscribed to the relevant information service, and (3) whether they

4 Jamie Pietruska, “‘Forecasting in the Distant Parts of the Country’: The Politics of Rural Access to the National Weather Service in the Gilded Age,” unpublished paper presented at Brown University 19th Century US History Workshop, Department of History, September 2013; James Rodger Fleming, “Storms, Strikes, and Surveillance: The U.S. Army Signal Office, 1861-1891,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30, no. 2 (January 2000): 315–32. 5 Pietruska, “‘Forecasting in the Distant Parts of the Country’: The Politics of Rural Access to the National Weather Service in the Gilded Age,” 21–22. 94 had private telegraph lines to communicate orders to the exchanges without having to worry about traffic on the line. This chapter will explore stock quotations as a time-value-laden information product and will describe the situation faced by late-nineteenth century brokers in terms of all three value-effecting conditions. It will argue that the purveyors of quotation services encouraged a sort of ‘arms-race’ in financial information. As telegraphic technology diffused throughout the marketplace, the standards for simultaneity were constantly rising, and the pace at which information grew stale constantly accelerated. Indeed, it continues to accelerate today.

The chapter begins with a historiographical discussion, followed by a rough but necessary sketch of the history of the New York financial markets as it relates to their temporal structure and technologies. It is followed by a case study of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, the company that operated and monopolized the first telegraphic stock quotation service.

Starting in the 1970s and ‘80s, economic history literature on the long-distance telegraph largely focused on the effects of the telegraph on US market structure, both at the firm level and at the macroeconomic level. Alfred D. Chandler Jr. discussed the telegraph in his 1977 The Visible

Hand, but not at very great length. Chandler argued that the telegraph allowed for the integration of various functions within the sorts of larger, geographically-diffuse, multi-unit firms that he calls

“modern business enterprises.”6 JoAnne Yates elaborated on Chandler’s work, arguing that the telegraph expanded individual firms’ market area and that a variety of theoretical and empirical factors can help explain the paradoxical result that some firms internalized communication- dependent processes that previously operated via a competitive market and other firms externalized them even further than they had previously.7 Alexander James Field further developed this line of scholarly inquiry with his study of the effects of the telegraph on long term

6 Alfred D. Chandler Jr, The Visible Hand (Harvard University Press, 1977), 79. 7 JoAnne Yates, “The Telegraph’s Effect on Nineteenth Century Markets and Firms,” Business and Economic History 15 (January 1, 1986): 149–63. 95 economic growth in terms of its capital-saving abilities. In other words, firms in the perishable goods industries and railroad industries, two of the largest sectors in the industrial economy, were able to use capital differently and more efficiently as a result of telegraph-enabled logistical control systems. He also cites the origins of what would become in a later period “just in time” manufacturing.8 There has been, related to this, useful work quantifying price convergences and other cliometric indicators of expanding market areas.9

Other lines of scholarly inquiry have investigated the way in which the telegraph simultaneously created and represented new forms of economic activity, or new ways of carrying on previously possible economic activity. In this group we might place the work of Hochfelder,

Levy, and Fabian. All three have worked on gambling shops that allowed bettors to wager on the rise or fall of agricultural commodity futures prices or other securities prices as communicated by printing telegraph. They track the legal and extralegal battles between ‘legitimate’ exchanges and the so-called “bucket shops” to examine the countervailing forces of democratization of financial speculation; erection of boundaries on, for, and around finance; and the vexed issue of finance’s legitimacy.10 Sociologist Alex Preda, relatedly, has done much to foreground the aspect of the

8 Alexander James Field, “The Magnetic Telegraph, Price and Quantity Data, and the New Management of Capital,” The Journal of Economic History 52, no. 2 (June 1, 1992): 410. 9 Richard B. DuBoff, “Business Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844-1860,” The Business History Review 54, no. 4 (December 1, 1980): 459–79; Richard B. DuBoff, “The Telegraph and the Structure of Markets in the United States, 1845–1890,” Research in Economic History 8 (1983): 253–77, HC10 R4 8; Christopher Hoag, “The Atlantic Telegraph Cable and Capital Market Information Flows,” The Journal of Economic History 66, no. 2 (June 1, 2006): 342–53; Byron Lew and Bruce Cater, “The Telegraph, Co-Ordination of Tramp Shipping, and Growth in World Trade, 1870-1910,” European Review of Economic History 10, no. 2 (August 1, 2006): 147–73. 10 David Hochfelder, “‘Where the Common People Could Speculate’: The Ticker, Bucket Shops, and the Origins of Popular Participation in Financial Markets, 1880–1920,” The Journal of American History 93, no. 2 (2006): 335–58; David Hochfelder, “Partners in Crime: The Telegraph Industry, Finance Capitalism, and Organized Gambling, 1870–1920,” IEEE History Center, Rutgers University.(unpublished Paper), 2001, http://ieeeghn.org/wiki/images/5/5b/Hochfelder.pdf; Jonathan Ira Levy, “Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875–1905,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (April 1, 2006): 307–35; Ann Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Routledge, 2013). 96 printing telegraph that made that abstraction ‘the market,’ immediately and simultaneously

‘present’ for so many people—revolutionizing the visual and emotional experience of ‘finance.’11

Within this historiography there has been, understandably, an emphasis placed on long distance applications of the telegraph, and on geographically diffuse firms such as railroad companies. The cost savings of the telegraph vary directly with distance, so a priori we could assume the most dramatic effects are to be found in trans-Atlantic or trans-continental information or commodity movements (and historical documents bear this out).12 And for contemporaries, the most captivating aspect of the telegraph was its ability to draw places that were formerly felt to be unimaginably far away close to home.13 In this chapter, however, most of the characters are located in New York City, often with New England origins. The telegraph, it is well known, was useful for its speed advantage over alternative means of communication.14 But as this chapter’s case study shows, even very slight gains in speed could have immense commercial value when the time-value of the information (that is, the extent to which the value of the information depreciates over duration) was seen to be very high by a group of users. And this dynamic can play out at relatively small geographic scales. For many, perhaps most, people in the nineteenth century, the expense of telegraphy might only have been justifiable occasionally when the speed advantage over mail was a matter of days or weeks, not hours. But for a certain

11 Alex Preda, “Socio-Technical Agency in Financial Markets: The Case of the Stock Ticker,” Social Studies of Science 36, no. 5 (October 1, 2006): 753–82; Alex Preda, Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2009). 12 Hoag, “The Atlantic Telegraph Cable and Capital Market Information Flows.” 13 “Collins’ Overland Telegraph,” The Telegrapher, October 31, 1864, Vol 1 edition, Hathi Trust; “World Telegraphs—The China Link,” The Telegrapher, October 31, 1864, Vol 1 edition, Hathi Trust. 14 Carey argues that the telegraph was the first device to separate communication from transportation. In other words, no messenger—human or otherwise—had to travel from point of origin to point of destination for the message itself to appear at its destination. We can think, then, that the value of the telegraph in a particular instance might be a function of the magnitude of its improvement over the next- best alternative. And that is basically determined by the difficulty or ease of rapid travel between the points. James W Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, by James W Carey (Taylor & Francis, 1989), 3. 97 class of users speed and precision were worth fortunes.15 What this chapter shows is that a century before computers came into use at Wall Street banks, economies of speed were part and parcel of finance.

This chapter isn’t the first work to point out the existence of markets for speed in the nineteenth century, nor is it the first to point out that these markets were enabled and transformed by the printing telegraph (also known as the stock ticker). But this chapter will be looking at this market with a somewhat particular focus. It will be looking at this market as the logical extension of the objectification of time on the factory floor, and as part of a temporality in which time was an alienable, fungible, and quantifiably valuable object. It will be working through a temporality in which time could be and was subjected to the logic of management as yet another cost factor.16

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The New York Stock Exchange, as it exists today, dates back to a merger facilitated in

1869. But organization among stock brokers for the purpose of limiting competition and controlling the boundaries of the legitimate financial transactions dates back to 1792.17

In the early years of the US, stocks and bonds were normally bought as investments and held for life, or until the corporation was dissolved and the shareholders paid. Trading investment positions with other potential investors was not a common activity, but there was demand enough for local merchants to gather twice a day in the early 1790s—once in the

15 Müller and Tworek observe that submarine telegraphy was almost exclusively used by imperial governments and corporations. This observation is only slightly less true for US domestic overland telegraphy. Simone M. Müller and Heidi J.S. Tworek, “‘The Telegraph and the Bank’: On the Interdependence of Global Communications and Capitalism, 1866–1914,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 02 (July 2015): 259–83. 16 I suppose I might also note that this chapter contains what I believe is the first dedicated case study of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company using its company records. 17 Preda, Framing Finance, 67–68. 98 morning and once in the evening—to trade securities. The owner would hand over his securities to an auctioneer for the latter to sell them on his behalf. The auctioneer would call out the name of the security and other relevant particulars at one of these twice daily meetings and other merchants could bid on it. In March of 1792 the first attempt at regularization occurred when a group of brokers announced their intention to fix the auction time at noon.18 The auctions became yet more formalized in May of that year when a group of “Brokers for the Purchase and

Sale of Public Stock” signed a written agreement stating, “we will not buy or sell from this day, for any person whatsoever, any kind of Public Stock, at a less rate than one quarter per cent.

Commission on the specie value, and that we will give a preference to each other in our

Negotiations.”19 The now-closed group still had little formal structure and only dealt in a handful of federal and state government debt instruments and the stocks of a few New York banks and insurance companies.20 Most members were merchants with other, more lucrative, businesses besides securities trading.

In the aftermath of the economic and political turmoil caused by the War of 1812, the dealers party to the Buttonwood Agreement reorganized into the New York Stock and Exchange

Board in 1817.21 Under its new organization the auctions became more formal, with members being fined for missing a session. Still, the full-time professional stockbroker had yet to appear.22

For the next decades, the exchange would continue to function more or less as a private club, albeit one with an expanding volume of trade. It was a place where various forms of price

18 Robert Sobel, The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market (New York: Free Press, 1965), 19–21. 19 Re-printed in Edmund Clarence Stedman and Alexander N. Easton, The New York Stock Exchange; Its History, Its Contribution to National Prosperity, and Its Relation to American Finance at the Outset of the Twentieth Century (New York : Stock Exchange Historical Company, 1905), 36, http://archive.org/details/cu31924030206506. 20 Charles R. Geisst, Wall Street: A History (Oxford University Press, USA, 1997), 14. 21 See Sobel, The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market, 29–31, for a more detailed description of how and why this re-organization occured when and as it did. 22 Ibid., 31. 99 manipulation were the norm and the most trading activity occurred on stocks with little to no underlying value—this was not much of a place for raising capital. Throughout the 1830s and

‘40s, the newspapers were used by speculators to spread misinformation about the underlying values of companies, driving sharp price movements that could be used to advantage by insiders.23 In an environment in which information travelled slowly and unevenly, the market was particularly susceptible to rumor and hearsay, especially regarding non-local happenings.

Only members of the Exchange Board were allowed to trade at their daily gathering on Wall

Street. Prices were recorded daily for the benefit of exchange members but were not regularly made available to non-members via newspapers or circulars.24 In addition, in 1819 the governors of the exchange amended the rules to proscribe telling outsiders which members of the board were buyers or sellers of which stocks or the prices they offered for these transactions.25

The 1840s and ‘50s saw the introduction of the telegraph—first successfully demonstrated in 1844. New York had long been in competition with Philadelphia and Boston for the prestige of being the premier banking center of the United States but once the telegraph made it possible for exchanges across the US to quote the same price simultaneously the market was bound to centralize to prevent unnecessary risks from arbitrage. A Pennsylvania state government recovering from bankruptcy due to the 1837 recession and an increasingly marginal port in

Philadelphia may have been contributing factors to New York winning out in the centralization of the ‘40s and ‘50s.26

The telegraph brought spurious mining companies purportedly exploiting the California gold rush within reach of eastern investors. Newspapers around the country also started

23 Geisst, Wall Street, 31. 24 Ibid., 20–21. 25 Sobel, The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market, 38–39. 26 Ibid., 49–55. 100 publishing New York price quotations regularly. Therefore it was around this time that New

York financial markets began to take on a more national character and less regional character.

By the 1860s the twice-daily auction system of the New York Stock Exchange was evidently not meeting the demands of financial speculators. A series of competing exchanges were opened in New York, and Exchange members violated the Exchange’s rules by trading on those other exchanges in addition to the NYSE. In 1864 the Open Board was formed. Unlike the so-called ‘Regular Board’ it engaged in continuous trading between 8:30am and 5pm. Rather than separating securities temporally—by reading out the names one at a time—it separated them spatially. Each security was traded in a specific spot in the Open Board’s room, and people wishing to deal in that security would gather in that spot to transact business at any and every time of the Board’s trading day. This lead the Open Board to quickly outstrip the Regular

Board’s trading volume despite the latter’s claim to high social status.

The two boards merged in 1869.27 The Open Board members sought the prestige and legitimacy of the older, more reputable Regular Board. The members of the Regular Board, for their part, wanted access to the larger volume of trading that the Open Board brought with it.

Technically, the merger kept the two trading systems intact side-by-side: continuous trading happened in one room and the traditional auction-calls happened in another. But, in effect, the auction system was over despite not being officially phased out until 1882 for stocks (1902 for

27 A blurring of the boundaries between the two occurred a year earlier in 1868, when it became possible for Open Board members to buy membership on the Regular Board. Many Open Board traders took advantage of the opportunity and purchased seats for between seven and eight thousand dollars. Geisst, Wall Street, 68. 101 bonds). The overwhelming majority of trading activity happened in the continuously operating

‘Long Room.’28

Between the end of the US Civil War and World War I, US financial markets expanded considerably, and transformed in response to new technologies and the new forms of commercial interaction they allowed for. As Davis and Cull document, the number of firms listed on the nation’s premier exchange, the New York Stock Exchange, rapidly grew over the last four decades of the ‘long nineteenth century.’ As it grew, the capital market also matured in the sense that it came to represent an increasingly broad and diverse section of the US corporate economy.

Initially, the vast majority of private securities traded on the exchange were those of railroad corporations. In fact, Chandler argues that in its infancy it was the financing needs of the railroads that made New York “one of the largest and most sophisticated capital markets in the world.”29 As the number of firms listed on the exchange grew, however, railroad companies came to represent a smaller and smaller proportion of the US capital market, indicating that

Figure 9: Total number of firms listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December of various years. Data from Davis and Cull, “International Capital Movements,” p766, Table 16.10.

28 Sobel, The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market, 77–86; Steven H. Jaffe, Jessica Lautin, and Museum of the City of New York, Capital of Capital: Money, Banking, and Power in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2014). 29 Chandler Jr, The Visible Hand, 92. 102 capital-raising through stock issuance was becoming accessible to a wider set of industries, and thus growing in importance to the US economy.30

The tenor of US financial markets also changed, perhaps even more dramatically than did their scale. Whereas, prior to the 1860s, formal trading in securities had been a highly ritualized and carefully paced affair, the decade would see the merger of the Open Board and the

Regular Board, forming the New York Stock Exchange, a new entity engaged in continuous and uninterrupted trading operations from open to closing.

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Prior to the commercial introduction of the printing telegraph, the means by which brokers acquired price information was teams of messenger boys. Young boys would run from brokers’ offices to the floors of various exchanges (or to the street curb outside of them, in other cases) and listen as people called buys and sells of stocks. Each boy usually tracked a few specific securities and would listen for those particular ones to be called out. Once a transaction took place the boys would scribble the information down onto a scrap of paper and then run back to the brokers’ office with the paper.

One of the most obvious features of this information transmittal system was that it added to the already large crowds at the exchange locations. Contemporaries describe the scene as being somewhat chaotic, with speculators, paying observers, messengers, and clerks running about. Often, contemporary observers marveled at the level of accuracy achieved by the complicated and jargon-filled shouts, hand gestures, facial expressions, or eye contacts used to close deals worth fortunes. But such awe seems to have been directed towards the speculators,

30 Lance E. Davis and Robert J. Cull, “International Capital Movements, Domestic Capital Markets, and American Economic Growth, 1820–1914,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States: The Long Nineteenth Century, by Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 765–771. 103 who were initiates to an exclusive and arcane guild-like body (that either signified secret knowledge or deceptiveness depending on one’s politics). Messengers were almost never talked about at all. Still, Calahan, as we know, found them irksome enough to allegedly invent an entire industry to stop their trade. And William Fowler sneered at “those rattle-pated little urchins, too often entrusted with important messages in Wall Street.”31 In one of Fowler’s anecdotes two messenger boys got distracted scuffling with each other and one of them dropped his slip of paper with sensitive information on it, to the ruin of the two speculators whose secret plans were entrusted to the boy. But by-and-large, the sorts of texts produced by financiers and financial writers tend to focus almost exclusively on the speculators themselves, and ignore the labor apparatus surrounding them that facilitated their trades, except to note the size and noise of the crowds. This lacuna in these documents says much about how financiers and financial writers thought about themselves as a professional group and how they tried to use memoirs, manuals, and articles to assert their expertise and the boundedness of the professional group.32 In point of fact, while the so-called “operators” usually were cast as solitary geniuses of a sort, an 1881 text attests that they had, on average, five clerks, office boys and messengers each. In other terms, the author stated, there were some ten thousand people so employed in New York City.33

Another feature of the price information distribution system prior to 1867 is that it was discontinuous. While the messengers may have run back and forth throughout the day, brokers would not have experienced the financial market as a continuous unfolding through time, but

31 Fowler, Ten Years in Wall Street, 280. 32 Preda, Framing Finance, 19. Preda disagrees with the use of the term "professionalization" in the context of financial operators. The creation of boundaries, he asserts, was a more complex process involving a dialogical relationship between technologies and modes of interpretation. One might think, however, that the term “professionalization” can stretch to accommodate the sort of processes Preda is interested in. 33 A Successful Operator, How to Win in Wall Street (New York: G.W. Carleton & Company, 1881), 168. 104 rather as a temporal field containing unpredictably long lags, punctuated by moments of information.34

Lastly, brokers would have no way of knowing how quickly or slowly they had come to learn of a trade relative to other market operators. The relative order in which they would have received communications would have depended on a combination of distance from the various exchanges, speed at which their messengers can move, and some element of chance.

All three of these conditions were destroyed by the telegraphic printer. The telegraphic printer, also known as the stock ticker, offered brokers and their clients an experience of the financial exchanges as continuous, simultaneous, and (more) predictable. Because it communicated price quotations continuously as they were created by buying and selling activity, it removed both the lags and the spikes in information that brokers’ offices experienced using human messengers. There were still times where market activity was more or less intense, and this meant a faster or slower movement of the ticker tape, as contemporary observers testified.

But the broker could be sure that the slow-moving tape reflected the actual state of the market rather than his own information asymmetry, and the rate of movement itself constituted information for the broker in a way that the non-presence of a messenger boy did not. The broker also knew that whatever information he received was also being received by most or all other market participants virtually simultaneously. He then knew exactly what his competitors knew as far as price and volume quotation on the exchanges were concerned, removing yet another source of uncertainty. Wall Street in the late-nineteenth century was still dominated by forms of collusion, manipulation, and insider trading that placed privileged information and powerful alliances at a high premium. Powerful operators would form ‘pools’ to buy a stock and

34 For an excellent theorization of the distinction between ‘occasional’ and ‘continuous’ temporalities see the introduction in Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 105 drive its price higher, threatening the margins of people who were shorted and forcing them to make margin calls at high prices to avoid total losses—or simply wiping out their margins outright and then taking the short position once the ‘bears’ had been pushed out of the market.

But a particular uncertainty with regards to time had been overcome, creating a smoother market temporality—and one more in keeping with continuous mechanical clock time. One company, formed to exploit one patent, was responsible to a large extent, for implementing this transformation. What follows is a study of that company using archival records from it and other firms, patent applications, advertisements, and the published recollections of individuals connected with the stock ticker business.

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Edward A. Calahan was born in Boston in 1838. He attended the city’s public schools before going on to work as an operator in a Boston telegraph office in the late 1850s. As a telegraph operator in the mid-nineteenth century he would have straddled various social and class boundaries. Operators dressed and comported themselves, as did clerks, as members of the rising urban middle class.35 At the same time, they considered themselves to be laborers, though in a qualified sense. Serious unionization efforts took place at least by 1864 and subsequent years of organizing and (sometimes awkward) relations with labor groups like the Knights of Labor reached a high pitch in a major albeit unsuccessful strike in 1883.36

Edward Calahan, however, quickly placed himself firmly in the ranks of management. In

1861 he moved to New York City to take a management position as Chief Operator for

Manhattan at the Western Union Telegraph Company. Supposing he was at least 16 when he

35 Edwin Gabler, The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860–1900 (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 29. 36 James G Smith, “President’s Report,” The Telegrapher, September 26, 1864, Vol 1 edition, Hathi Trust; “Expulsions,” The Telegrapher, October 31, 1864, Vol 1 edition, Hathi Trust; Gabler, The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860–1900, introduction. 106 left school, this would mean less than seven years as an operator before taking over management of one of the largest telegraph bureaus in the world at the time.37

Calahan is widely credited with the invention of the printing telegraph in 1867.38 His was not the first device of its kind, however. Royal E. House, a fellow inventor and New Englander demonstrated the first functioning printing telegraph in 1844, in the very early days of telegraphy.39 His printing telegraph was in commercial use from 1850 to 1855, running on lines between Washington and Boston, and west to Cleveland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis.40 But it couldn’t survive the competitive pressures of a maturing telegraph industry. Morse’s code-based telegraph was vastly simpler, cheaper, and easier to use than House’s exceedingly complicated and unwieldy machine, which required four operators, two at the transmitting station and two at the receiving.41

Invented two decades later, Calahan’s printing telegraph machine was simpler and more versatile than House’s device had been. Whereas House’s device required operators to use a cipher (numbers were represented by letters and the receiving operator was responsible for knowing whether the letters were numbers or not based on the presence of two dots in front of the ciphered letters), Calahan’s printing telegraph could represent letters, numbers, common fractions, and some symbols directly. More important, however, is that Calahan clearly conceived of his device as a technology for the distribution of identical information to multiple

37 “E. A. Calahan, Inventor, Dies: Originator of Gold and Stock Ticker and Multiplex Telegraph System,” New York Times, September 13, 1912. 38 Edward A. Calahan, Improvement in telegraphic indicators, US76157 A, issued March 31, 1868, http://www.google.com/patents/US76157. 39 Franklin L. Pope, “Royal E House,” Scientific American, April 13, 1895. 40 Anton A. Huurdeman, The Worldwide History of Telecommunications (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 65. 41 Ibid.; Pope, “Royal E House”; Royal E. House, Improvement in magnetic printing-telegraphs, US4464 A, issued April 18, 1846, http://www.google.com/patents/US4464; For a simplified, modern description of how the device worked, see “Letter Printing Telegraph – US Patent 4464,” accessed February 20, 2016, http://blog.gatunka.com/2014/04/14/letter-printing-telegraph-us-patent-4464/. 107 receiver stations simultaneously. Most obvious in this respect is that it didn’t require an operator to attend to the machine at the receiver station, which was also incapable of originating messages in the first place.

The idea that a printing telegraph could be used for distributing information across systems rather than point-to-point actually came to Calahan earlier than the idea of a telegraphic printer per se. Later in life, he wrote that his inspiration was being buffeted about on a rainy

April day by Wall Street’s small army of messenger boys. The idea was to replace this chaotic and—he thought, inefficient—system of communicating prices from the exchanges back to the brokers offices with something faster and less erratic.42 He thus designed a telegraphic indicator for the price of Gold. In his patent description he claimed to have invented a device to meet the demand for a “cheap and reliable indicator” for telegraphing price information “from the centres of trade to distant business firms…” And wrote that his device was designed such that all “dials in a telegraphic circuit are all brought to the same indicating point by the pulsations of electricity from one of the transmitting-instruments.”43

Calahan soon discovered that Samuel S Laws not only had already built a telegraphic price indicator to track fluctuations in the price of gold,44 but that he had been granted exclusive rights by the Gold Exchange to transmit price changes.45 Calahan changed tack and modified his indicator such that it provided alphanumeric quotations—impossible on Laws’ strictly numeric indicator—and that it could print the same. Printing price quotations on a continuous strip (or

“tape”) of paper allowed different securities to be quoted one after another by a single device.

Without printing, a separate indicator dial would have been necessary for each object of interest

42 Edward A Calahan, “The Evolution of the Stock Ticker,” Electrical World and Engineer, February 9, 1901. 43 Calahan, Improvement in telegraphic indicators. 44 Samuel S. Laws, Improvement in electrical indicators, US72742 A, issued December 31, 1867, http://www.google.com/patents/US72742. 45 Calahan, “The Evolution of the Stock Ticker.” 108

(gold, government debt, a particular railroad stock) or some method of continuously updating the label on a single indicator dial would have been needed. Clearly, the paper tape was a more elegant solution.46 This printer, then, growing as it did semi-accidentally from an effort to produce a price indicator, was a totally different technology than that of House.

In 1867 a group of capitalists incorporated the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company in the state of New York for the purpose of exploiting Calahan’s new technology.* Despite the device’s novelty, it seems the Company had a clear idea of what function their device would perform in the finance industry. The 1867 Articles of Association, drafted as a preliminary to a formal Act of Incorporation, stated that the company would incorporate for the purpose of constructing telegraph lines, and “especially a line from the Gold and Stock Exchanges to the offices of Brokers and others in the City of New York and other places...”47

It took the Company’s agents two months to secure commitments from a first round of twenty-five subscribers. This initial group was composed of brokerage firms in New York City and included the prominent firms Henry Clews & Co., David Groesbeck & Co., and Lockwood

& Co.48 Subscribers agreed to pay $100 to rent the instruments and $6 per week for information service, which was to consist of the sale prices and quantities from “the several Stock Boards” and the Long Room. The Gold and Stock Company contracted the work of manufacturing the instruments to another company, although later it would bring the manufacturing operation in-

46 Edward A. Calahan, Improvement in printing-telegraphs, US99401 A, issued February 1, 1870, http://www.google.com/patents/US99401. * Note: Two of these men also financed the American District Telegraph Company four years later (see Chapter 2). 47 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Book of Records” (New York, August 1867), Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 48 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1867 to 1870” (New York, August 1867), 7–8., Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43; For example, Lockwood and Co is reputed to have done as much as $4 million in business in a single day, see Fowler, Ten Years in Wall Street, 68. 109 house to reduce costs.49 The business expanded rapidly in its first months, as shown in the following chart and accompanying table. Within its first year it jumped from 25 to 122 instruments in operation, doubled that figure in the following six months, and more than doubled it again in three more months before stabilizing somewhat. There is no indication from company records that the slow-down in the rate of business growth in the company’s second year was due to attrition of customers; more likely the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company had by that point simply saturated the available market of the time.

Figure 10.

Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, First Months

900

800

700

600

500

400

300

200

NUMBER OF INSTRUMENTS IN OPERATION 100

0 Jun-68 Sep-68 Dec-68 Apr-69 Jul-69 Oct-69 Feb-70 May-70 Aug-70 Nov-70 TIME

Date Number of Instruments 08/1868 122* 04/05/1869 246* 09/07/1869 611* 11/09/1869 646* 12/07/1869 607* 01/11/1870 606*

49 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1867 to 1870,” 8, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 110

02/08/1870 629* 03/1870 635* 04/1870 643* 05/1870 651* 06/1870 675* 08/1870 756* 09/13/1870 773* Later data not included on chart: 11/30/1875 314† 05/31/1903 1037‡ * Data from minutes of Executive Committee meetings held between 1867 and 1870 † Data from 1875 “New York Circuits” internal company document. Only includes instruments in New York City and certain nearby areas (e.g. Brooklyn) ‡ Data from 1903 “New York Circuits” internal company document. Only includes instruments in New York City and certain nearby areas (e.g. Brooklyn)50

Estimates of the number of instruments operated by the Gold and Stock Telegraph

Company in subsequent years are controversial. The Gold and Stock Telegraph Company kept voluminous records, but most of these do not seem to have survived. We know that they kept substantial records in part because two surviving documents list the address and owner of every instrument in New York City in 1875 and 1903, respectively.51 It is unlikely that these were the only two times the company produced such a document, or that there was no master register from which the New York documents were culled. These documents also shed light on how the company operated, about which we will say more below.

From August 12, 1869 the secretary was required to make monthly tallies of the number of instruments in operation, the date when each new instrument was connected to the network

50 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1867 to 1870,” NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43; Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “New York Circuits as Arranged at 5 P.M. November 30th, 1875” (New York, December 1875), Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45; Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “New York Circuits as Arranged at 5 P.M. May 31st, 1903” (New York, June 1903), Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 41. 51 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “New York Circuits as Arranged at 5 P.M. November 30th, 1875,” NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45; Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “New York Circuits as Arranged at 5 P.M. May 31st, 1903,” NMAH.AC.0205 Box 41. 111 and the name of the subscriber, and removals and repairs of instruments.52 These documents do not survive. Estimates made by contemporaries and compiled by Preda are a confusing jumble.

At the low end, one estimate was that the national total in 1890 was 400 tickers, although another estimate says there were 1,000 in New York City alone as early as 1882. Estimates for the year 1900 range from the low-800s to nearly 2,000. And one source puts the national figure at 23,000 in 1905.53 The figures represented in Table 3.2 can be taken as accurate, coming as they do from internal company documents and being used as they were for organizing labor resources. But the figures so obtained are limited in that they only include New York City,

Brooklyn, Jersey City, and a couple scattered outliers; and because they may very well pertain strictly to telegraphic printers and not capture non-printing indicators. The latter were also a product sold by the Gold and Stock Company and imprecise definitions of the term ‘instrument’ complicate any estimates.54

The Gold and Stock Company fairly well monopolized the industry, the size of which may be subject to some dispute. As the sole owner of Calahan’s patent, it enjoyed a monopoly, which it jealously defended. In 1869 the Gold and Stock company purchased Samuel S Laws’s patent rights to his gold indicator and stock printer in a move to head off competition. It continued to produce and service Laws’s gold indicator but took his stock printer out of production and service.55 When, later in 1869, Thomas Alva Edison invented an improved printing telegraph that required one wire instead of three to control its movement, the Gold and

52 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1867 to 1870,” 55, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 53 Preda, Framing Finance, 127. 54 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1867 to 1870,” 156, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 55 Ibid., 74–75, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43; Calahan, “The Evolution of the Stock Ticker,” 237. 112

Stock company purchased the rights also.56 Next came an improved printing telegraph from an inventor named George M. Phelps in 1870. The innovation of his device was that it had an improved mechanism to keep the two type wheels synchronized with each other, a source of much vexation and annoyance with early stock tickers.57 (Two type wheels were used to print characters on two rows: names of securities were on the top row and price and quantity exchanged were on the bottom row. The two type wheels were liable to get out of sync with each other and setting them aright required an employee of the Gold and Stock company to go to the subscriber’s office and adjust the machine.) This patent was also promptly bought up by the Gold and Stock company.58

In 1872 a competitor called the Manhattan Quotation Telegraph Company entered the field, trying to market an alternative printing telegraph.59 It was quickly attacked with a set of three lawsuits from the Gold and Stock company, along with additional lawsuits from the

Western Union Telegraph Company and John J Kiernan, who had subcontracted the right to distribute telegraphic price information from the Gold and Stock company.60 The Manhattan

Telegraph Quotations Company was bought by the Gold and Stock company a few years later in

1877.61 The Gold and Stock company did not face a meaningful challenger until late-1883, when

56 Thomas A. Edison, Improvement in printing-telegraph apparatus, US96567 A, issued November 9, 1869, http://www.google.com/patents/US96567; Calahan, “The Evolution of the Stock Ticker.” 57 George M. Phelps, Improvement in printing-telegraphs, USRE4152 E, issued October 11, 1870, http://www.google.com/patents/USRE4152. 58 Calahan, “The Evolution of the Stock Ticker,” 237. 59 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1871–1878” (New York, October 1871), 4, Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 60 Marshall Lefferts, “Reduction in Price” (New York, December 30, 1873), Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45; American Law Review (Little, Brown and Company, 1876); “Property in News.; Decision in the Case of Kiernan Against the Manhattan Quotation Telegraph Company—The Right to Exclusive Information,” The New York Times, January 6, 1876, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C02E6DD113FE73BBC4E53DFB766838D669FDE. 61 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1871–1878,” 73–74, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 113 the Commercial Telegram Company, armed with its own printing telegraph device, gained access to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for its reporters.62

In addition to buying patents, the Gold and Stock company also sought and protected its monopoly status by making exclusive agreements with other powerful and monopolistic corporations in related fields. It negotiated, for instance, an agreement with the powerful

Western Union Telegraph Company in 1871 in which Western Union promised to stay out of the commercial news reporting business in exchange for Gold and Stock’s promise that it would exclusively use Western Union company telegraph wires for all of its business.63 Western Union also promised to give priority to the messages of the Gold and Stock company over other users of the wire.

In 1873 the Gold and Stock company contracted with the Associated Press, which had a virtual monopoly on telegraphic news reporting services, to get exclusive access to foreign financial news 30 minutes before other AP customers such as newspapers. Offering customers a

30-minute head start on financial news from the London, Paris, and Frankfurt exchanges was an extremely high value proposition, and Gold and Stock paid $2,000 per month for the privileges.64

62 “Commercial Telegram Company, Appellant v. James D. Smith, as President of the New York Stock Exchange, Etc., Respondent,” in The New York State Reporter: Containing All the Current Decisions of the Courts of Record of New York State ... (W.C. Little & Company, 1888). 63 William Orton, “Covenant. The Western Union Telegraph Co with Marshall Lefferts, Tracy R Edson, David J Garth, Addison F Roberts, Joseph M Cook, William B Clerke, Joseph Laneque[?], Holders of the Stock of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Co Acting on Their Own and Other Stockholders Behalf.” (New York, May 25, 1871), Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45; The Gold & Stock Telegraph Company and The Western Union Telegraph Company, “Agreement” (New York, May 25, 1871), Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45. 64 “Property in News.; Decision in the Case of Kiernan Against the Manhattan Quotation Telegraph Company—The Right to Exclusive Information”; Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1871–1878,” 11, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 114

The Gold and Stock Telegraph Company obviously had to have access to the floors of the exchanges to collect the quotations, and they also paid for this.65 Negotiations between the

Gold and Stock Telegraph Company and the New York Stock Exchange were sometimes strained. In 1873 the two disputed the amount the Gold and Stock company should pay the exchange and the latter threatened to remove the former’s machines from their premises. The question of pricing access to information was potentially explosive in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, as Ann Fabian has chronicled in her history of gambling and the ideology of producerism in the nineteenth century United States.66 The Gold and Stock company did contest the NYSE’s right to share in their revenues on the grounds that the NYSE provided no capital and assumed no risk in their enterprise, but shied away from explicitly saying that the NYSE provided no product to them. Neither did they affirmatively state that the NYSE does provide a product. Instead of invoking the language of commodities, the Gold and Stock sidestepped the question by making the anodyne admission that the privilege of setting up machines and reporters inside the rooms of exchange had “a value.”67

In the 1870s the boundaries between the Gold and Stock company and Western Union began to blur. The company’s Executive Committee entertained the possibility of merging several departments with their Western Union counterparts in 1875, but the effort was temporarily put on hold because there wasn’t enough room in Western Union’s building to store all of Gold and Stock’s batteries.68 In 1878 Western Union entered into an agreement to build wires on behalf of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, to be turned over to the latter at cost

65 For another example, they made an exclusive agreement with the Gold Exchange, see Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1871–1878,” NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 66 Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops, 161ff. 67 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1871–1878,” 21–22, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 68 Ibid., 68, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 115 plus ten percent, or rented for $20–50 per mile per year directly from Western Union depending on location.69 The two companies jointly hired an agent to start a telephone business in smaller

New England towns in 1879, it being agreed that such system would be paid for by both companies and ultimately transferred to Gold and Stock control.70 Finally, on January 1, 1882

Western Union effectively absorbed the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company by leasing all of their tangible and intangible assets—including the right to conduct business in the name of the

Gold and Stock Telegraph Company—for 99 years.71 From 1882 onward, the Gold and Stock

Telegraph Company would continue to exist as a corporation only for the purposes of issuing stock and paying shareholder dividends, the name and business being run as a Western Union brand.

So much for the corporate structure of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company. We have yet to explore the way in which telegraphic price communication was conducted except to note that it consisted of distribution of information from a small number of sources to a large number of receivers identically and simultaneously.

To collect this information the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company kept reporters on the floors of the various exchanges and boards of trade. These included the New York Stock

Exchange, the New York Gold Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade (for agricultural futures), and a host of smaller exchanges and boards of trade. It was the job of these reporters to collect the prices and quantities at which securities or futures were sold and report them via telegraph machines in the rooms. It is likely that messenger boys brought slips with the buy and sell orders

69 George Walker, “Circular No. 17” (New York, May 6, 1878), 17, Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45. 70 “Minutes of the Committee on Expenditures and Finance” (New York, 1878), 37–38, Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 44. 71 The Gold & Stock Telegraph Company and The Western Union Telegraph Company, “Indenture” (New York, December 14, 1881), Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45 Folder 2. 116 from the various trading locations on the floor to the transmitting telegraph operators, it being unlikely that the latter could monitor the room and type accurate figures simultaneously.72 The number of employees posted at each location would depend on the size and importance of the exchange or board of trade. In 1881 the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company employed one operator for New Orleans cotton futures at a rate of $25 per month.73 The Government Room in the New York Stock Exchange, where government bonds were dealt in, had a “Chief Reporter,” suggesting perhaps other reporters as well. The New York Mining Exchange, for example, had an “Assistant Reporter.”74

The telegraphic service was organized by information product. There were separate services for gold, stocks, cotton, coffee, petroleum, and produce. There was also a foreign and domestic commercial news service, a marine news service, and a time distribution service.

Subscribers could buy more than one. For instance, Henry Clews & Co subscribed to stocks, cotton, New York produce, and Chicago produce services.75 For each type of service there were circuits. The circuits roughly corresponded to geographic areas, but circuits often overlapped with each other and sometimes the same street address would appear on more than one circuit.

Each circuit was assigned to an inspector and a winder, and each inspector or winder supervised multiple circuits. The division of labor between the two is unclear, but the tasks performed

72 See the description of the Chicago Board of Trade in John Philip Quinn, Fools of Fortune or Gambling and Gamblers, 591–592. The telegraph operators are described as being so busy typing they scarcely pay attention to the hubbub around them, and messenger boys are described as scurrying around the room. 73 Figuring out what this salary meant at the time is complicated. Lawrence Officer calculates the average hourly earning for a US production worker in 1881 was $0.110. Translated into months this means between $17.60 (40 hrs/week) and $26.40 (60 hrs/week) per month. In either case, we can see that this salary is not radically different from that received by a typical factory operative. In other words—and without regard of differences in cost of living between US cities—the salaries of Gold and Stock low-level employees were not very high. See Lawrence H. Officer, Two Centuries of Compensation for U.S. Production Workers in Manufacturing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 74 “Minutes of the Executive Committee 1880–1882” (New York, 1880), 104, 126, Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 44. 75 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “New York Circuits as Arranged at 5 P.M. May 31st, 1903,” NMAH.AC.0205 Box 41. 117 certainly included restocking the ticker tape paper at the subscribers’ offices each week, setting the type wheels in unison (in the early days before the automatic unison mechanism), and winding (tightening) the telegraph wires.76

For consumers, the printing telegraph became their lifeline to financial markets. “It is through the instant dissemination of the quotations made on its floor,” one contemporary wrote,

Figure 11. Telegraph wires feature prominently on this frontispiece from Clews's autobiographical book Twenty-Eight Years in Wall Street (New York : J.S. Ogilvie Pub. Co., 1887).

“that the active and continuous interest in the markets is sustained.”77 For some, the ticker came to represent the intangible markets themselves. An anonymous author writing in 1881 described his experience on Wall Street thus:

76 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “New York Circuits as Arranged at 5 P.M. November 30th, 1875,” NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45; Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “New York Circuits as Arranged at 5 P.M. May 31st, 1903,” NMAH.AC.0205 Box 41; “Minutes of the Executive Committee 1880–1882,” 104, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 44. 118

Around this “ticker” gathered and grouped a knot of eager, nervous, and anxious men. Ten, fifteen or twenty at a time would clutch at the tape, as it streamed out with its endless lines of quotations, and mutter to themselves... and so it went on all day, from 10 till 3, when the battle was ended by the fall of the hammer in the Stock Exchange.78

For this writer, ‘Wall Street’ was this scene of men watching the ticker tape, not the exchange floor. Another writer-speculator, this time in 1897, said that it was the folly of 99 out of every 100 speculators that they anxiously watch the ticker and try to capitalize on sudden price movements, losing money to brokers’ commissions in the process.79 The Harvard Lampoon called the ticker

“sacred” to brokers.80

For many of its users, the printing telegraph was far more than a fetish object. The speed and reliability it offered had considerable value to many types of users. For other users, the speed was less necessary and purchasing it was perhaps more symbolic, aspirational, or fetishistic. We can divide the ticker’s users into three groups.

One group of users were ‘legitimate’ operators who had access to advance information.

As mentioned above, foreign financial news collected in Europe by agents of the Associated Press belonged by exclusive right to clients of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company or to clients of its licensee, John J Kiernan, for 30 minutes before the rest of the public. How long the information was actually kept secret is another matter entirely. It is almost certain that some of the recipients of Gold and Stock ticker services re-distributed the information themselves. The

Gold and Stock Executive Committee clearly believed this was the case.81 And with a subscriber

77 Horace L Hotchkiss, “The Stock Ticker (1905),” Telegraph and Telephone Age: Telegraphy-Telephony-Radio, August 16, 1917. 78 Printed in A Successful Operator, How to Win in Wall Street, 167. 79 “The Perils of Wall Street: The Penalty of Overtrading,” in King’s Views of the New York Stock Exchange: A History and Description..., by Moses King (New York: Moses King, 1897). 80 The Harvard Lampoon (Harvard Lampoon, 1879). 81 “Minutes of the Executive Committee 1880–1882,” 149–150, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 44. 119 list including dozens or hundreds of brokers, several newspapers, the Associated Press, the

Western Union, and other telegraph companies it is unlikely that the information would remain exclusive property longer than the time it took for it to be re-typed and forwarded.82 However it was still possible to act on the basis of advanced information in a number of ways. Arbitraging price differences between London and New York, New York and other US cities, and the NYSE and Consolidated exchanges was a lucrative business practiced by only a very small number of firms.83 Firms needed to have representatives or surrogates able to perform buy and sell orders in both the markets being arbitraged, and private wires connecting the two. If they were arbitraging between the two exchanges in New York, or between Chicago and New York prices for a commodity future, they would have had to have expensive memberships to both markets as well.

The firms that engaged in this sort of arbitrage were large, well-established, and often run by foreigners, including European Jewish banking families with social and kinship networks distributed in Germany, England, and the United States.84 Earlier price information also would have meant that much more time to see a corner being attempted (and getting out of the way), or a stock being sold off rapidly to trigger a price fall.

The second group are the bucket shop clients. Bucket shops were storefront operations that often looked, from the outside, a lot like brokers’ offices. They had one or more ticker machines, a large blackboard where clerks erased and re-wrote prices as the quotations came in, and a seating area for speculators to lounge in and watch the market play out. Bucket shop

82 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “New York Circuits as Arranged at 5 P.M. November 30th, 1875,” NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45. 83 Thomas F Woodlock, “Lombard Street and Wall Street: The London Market and Its Relations with the New York Stock Exchange,” in King’s Views of the New York Stock Exchange: A History and Description..., by Moses King (New York: Moses King, 1897), 17–22; Samuel Armstrong Nelson, The A B C of Options and Arbitrage (New York, Nelson, 1904), 50ff, http://archive.org/details/abcofoptionsarbi00nelsuoft, AEV- 0785. 84 Nelson, The A B C of Options and Arbitrage, 53, AEV-0785. 120 customers didn’t buy and sell stocks, bonds, or futures. Customers would bet on price movements, up or down, and would either lose their money or add to their money depending on the success of their bet. Bets were made against the bucket shop, which made money whenever its customers lost. Many customers traded on very small margins, making them vulnerable to slight price movements against their position. They also tended, as a population, to systematically bet on price rises. This, it has been argued, is in part because bucket shop customers were often agricultural producers who, for psychological reasons, could not bet against price increases.85

This also meant that manipulating prices downward was always in the bucket shop’s favor. Some scholars claim that bucket shops peddled rumors, false news, or even false commodities to manipulate prices. There are allegedly cases where they delayed the quotations on the blackboard by several minutes to give them an opportunity to refuse bets from people who—the bucket shop knows—will have won the minute the out-of-date blackboard is updated. One source claims that some bucket shops didn’t even connect their tickers to the proper exchanges and posted fake quotations.86

It’s fair to say that most bucket shops operated without such extravagant tricks and relied on customers’ tight margins for their income. Providing ticker service to bucket shops was a contentious issue in the late-nineteenth century, not least because bucket shops tended to erode the value of exchange memberships, an important source of income for the exchanges. Major exchanges tried to claim property rights to their price information and prohibit the information’s distribution to unauthorized storefronts that were hurting their profits and giving the exchanges

(and ‘legitimate’ speculators) a bad name.87 Gold and Stock telegraph contracts gave the NYSE,

85 Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops, 192. 86 Ibid. 87 “Gambling Contracts—‘Bucket Shops’ and ‘Tickers’—Contracts with a Telegraph Company,” The Railway and Corporation Law Journal: A Weekly Record of Current Corporation Law, 1887; “Commercial Telegram 121 for example, the right to approve all new Gold and Stock customers before service was started to them.88 The Gold and Stock company tried to navigate between a desire to expand their subscription lists and the need to avoid legal repercussions from the exchanges and boards of trade.89 The Gold and Stock company in some cases refused to provide instruments to businesses that were likely to have been bucket shops.90 It also knowingly supplied bucket shops in other cases, sometimes charging them higher rental rates, writing in minimum rental periods, including cancellation fees to compensate themselves for the risk.91

It would be hard to determine the extent to which the Gold and Stock company knew what their customers’ businesses really were. Many contemporaries observed that bucket shops looked identical to brokers’ offices and often called themselves brokers offices.92 Many nineteenth century bucket shop proprietors went so far as to claim there was no difference between their business and the business of brokers. In both cases money was gained or lost on the basis of price movements in financial markets and in neither line of business were the actual commodities represented by paper certificates and agreements ever intended to be delivered. Bucket shop owners were sometimes joined in this view by anti-gambling moralists who refused to exempt

Company, Appellant v. James D. Smith, as President of the New York Stock Exchange, Etc., Respondent”; Niles & Johnson and Rush Taggart, “Papers on Appeal from Order of Mr. Justice Bischoff, Denying the Motion of Petitioner for a Peremptory Writ of Mandamus,” in Printed Papers of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, First Department (New York: Appeal Printing Co, 1899); J Crane, Marcus Heim v. New York Stock Exchange (Supreme court, Kings County 1909). 88 Niles & Johnson and Taggart, “Papers on Appeal from Order of Mr. Justice Bischoff, Denying the Motion of Petitioner for a Peremptory Writ of Mandamus,” 24. 89 See the discussion of whether or not to rent instruments to bucket shops in Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1871–1878,” 149, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 90 See the case of the “Investment & Security Registry Exchange Limited,” a firm that dealt in unlisted securities and on one percent margins, in “Minutes of the Executive Committee 1880–1882,” 172, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 44; The Commercial & Financial Chronicle and Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine, vol. 34 (William B. Dana Company, 1882), 186. 91 “Minutes of the Executive Committee 1880–1882,” 117, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 44; See also the testimony of S.C.D. van Bokkelin, a bucket shop manager, in Making Corners and Dealing in Futures: With Reference to Its Effects Upon Commerce, and Its Influence Upon the Public Welfare (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, Legislative Printers, 1883), 771–773. 92 Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate,” 342–343. 122 stock exchange members or well-heeled speculators from the moral opprobrium they heaped on bucket shop proprietors.93

The third group of users can be described as ‘legitimate’ speculators without any privileged access to high-speed or early price information. Within this group I am including professional brokers as well as more and less casual speculators who used brokerage firms to buy and sell on the exchanges. In a large office there would have been a blackboard and clerks would have been continuously updating the price information listed on it while speculators sat in leather chairs watching the fluctuations and gossiping with each other. In this way they would have appeared little different from bucket shops in most respects. Smaller offices would have let the customers approach the ticker machine and read the quotations directly off the tape as they poured out of the device. When a client wanted to make a purchase or sale the broker would telegraph the order to his agent on the floor of the exchange who would effect the transaction.

To avoid delays from the wires being busy, an affluent brokerage firm would have private telegraph lines to the exchanges, provided by the Gold and Stock company, allowing them to place orders instantly.

A financial writer’s description of the methods used by financiers said, “to furnish information and receive orders, Wall Street houses find it pays to lease, at a considerable expense, private wires to the leading cities where they have connections.”94 And Henry Clews &

Co advertised its brokerage services by saying it had “Private Telegraph Wire to CHICAGO and other Points, also to all the BRANCH OFFICES” and “Parties doing business with us may

93 See the testimony of witnesses in Making Corners and Dealing in Futures: With Reference to Its Effects Upon Commerce, and Its Influence Upon the Public Welfare. 94 Henry E Wallace, “The Magnitude and Necessity of the Institution,” in King’s Views of the New York Stock Exchange: A History and Description..., by Moses King (New York: Moses King, 1897), 4. 123 telegraph orders and instructions at our expense. Our private telegraph code, and blank cheque books, will be furnished upon application.”95

Private lines are necessarily of apiece with other technologies marketed by the Gold and

Stock company offering clients small but highly valuable speed advantages. As an undated Gold and Stock advertisement shows, they presented the printing telegraph as part of a suite of instantaneous communication services. One of these services was the private line service.

Calahan, in another one of his late-in-life vanity articles published in an electrical engineering magazine, wrote that the private line business grew out of a popular early Gold and Stock business that sold New York banks the ability to communicate directly with each other via dedicated telegraph lines. Membership in this interbank communication scheme also gave members the privilege of seeing their weekly balance sheet with the Clearing House before the rest of Wall Street did.96 By 1877 the Gold and Stock company was in the telephone business via its subsidiary the American Speaking Telephone Company.97 In the aforementioned advertisement the Gold and Stock trumpeted a “Merchants’ Telephone Exchange System” that

“affords instantaneous communication with the leading firms and business houses in New

York.”98 Each subscriber, it went on, had their own “special wire… always ready for use.”99

What we can understand from this advertisement and from the particular assortment of services and products offered by the Gold and Stock company is that, more than just selling stock ticker technology, the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company was selling speed. The evidence for

95 Henry Clews, Twenty-Eight Years in Wall Street (New York : J.S. Ogilvie Pub. Co., 1887), http://archive.org/details/twentyeightyears00clewrich, nrlf_ucb:GLAD-329335, back matter following p 723. 96 Edward A. Calahan, “The Forerunner of the Telephone,” Electrical World and Engineer, 1901. 97 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “Executive Committee Meetings 1871–1878,” 148–149, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 43. 98 Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, “[Advertisement]” (New York, n.d.), Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institute, NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45. 99 Ibid., NMAH.AC.0205 Box 45. 124 this comes from the fact that the same company that offered the stock ticker also offered the

Merchants Telephone Exchange System and private lines. What unites these technologies is a sense of the importance of instantaneous communication between financial actors, and the notion that a profitable business can be run in providing that.

And we can draw similar conclusions from the legal battles between major exchanges and bucket shops. The major exchanges became what they did in large part because of the telegraphic stock ticker. By allowing dispersed actors to engage with the New York or Chicago market the telegraph arrogated to those exchanges business formerly given to smaller markets like Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, Deluth, and others by local speculators. In reducing the importance of ‘place’ for financial markets it paradoxically concentrated US capital markets in

New York (for stocks, bonds, and other securities) and futures markets in Chicago.100

But at the same time the exchanges had a fraught relationship with telegraph companies because those companies had the potential to weaken their information monopolies. Hochfelder writes that competition from bucket shops—at the start of the serious legal battles of the late-

1880s and ‘90s between the bucket shops and the exchanges—depressed the value of a NYSE membership from $34,000 to $18,000 and a Chicago Board of Trade membership from $2,500 to $800.101 What the exchanges really wanted was for the information to be seen by all, but acted upon by a select few. And for those select few to be the intermediaries through which all financial operations must pass. In Preda’s formulation, they wanted a highly public, mechanical, and

100 DuBoff, “Business Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844-1860”; DuBoff, “The Telegraph and the Structure of Markets in the United States, 1845–1890,” HC10 R4 8; Yates, “The Telegraph’s Effect on Nineteenth Century Markets and Firms.” 101 Hochfelder, “Partners in Crime,” 2. 125 socially legitimate representation of financial prices as well as a “distinction between users who are entitled and able to respond and those who are not.”102

The financial markets so represented, partially constituted, and enabled by the printing telegraph were in some sense sites where individuals traded units of time. The capital gain from a security or future depends on no physical commodity—and only very indirectly on the realities of production as far as an individual trader is concerned—but entirely on the proper choice of a time-point for purchase and a time-point for sale. What was accumulated or lost was price movement over duration. The telegraphic printers—and the associated technological, economic, and ideological apparatuses that they operated with—helped create a conventional agreement about the characteristics and qualities of points in time. Without a convention surrounding points in time they never could have become the basis for such a high volume, high value trade.

What I mean by such conventions is that, unlike in the pre-1867 financial markets, in the era of the stock ticker time-bound price information had a known and socially certified relationship to the activities on the exchanges, and a non-arbitrary or patterned relationship to current prices as they may have existed at any moment in time. The smooth temporality of the technology allowed time-points to have the stability and protection from (some forms of) uncertainty necessary for actors to use them as the basis for trade. And for evidence that the convention was successful we do not need to rely on anecdote: the value of access to higher- quality time-points (that is, time-points that are more current [see time-value, above]) was represented in the price the Gold and Stock company could command for its services.

102 Preda, “Socio-Technical Agency in Financial Markets,” 757–758. 126

Figure 12. Images from Edwin Thomas Holmes, A Wonderful Fifty Years: By Edwin T. Holmes, President Holmes Electric Protective Co., New York (Priv. pub. [Watkins Press], 1917).

Communications theorist James Carey wrote, “the telegraph shifts speculation into another dimension. It shifts speculation from space to time, from arbitrage to futures. After the telegraph, commodity trading moved from trading between places to trading between times.”103

While he may have been incorrect about the decline of arbitrage, what is more worthwhile is to consider whether geography was replaced with temporality in some areas of economic activity. In a sense, yes; but in another, more, material sense, no.

The telegraph expanded the geographic reach of the financial marketplace. It allowed speculators to telegraph their hunches to distant friends in country districts, which “amplified” the volatility of price fluctuations at the exchanges.104 So long as some stations took precedence over others on telegraph wires,105 and some clients took precedence at certain stations, and only

103 Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” 13. 104 A Successful Operator, How to Win in Wall Street, 128. 105 DuBoff, “The Telegraph and the Structure of Markets in the United States, 1845–1890,” 270, HC10 R4 8. 127 some lines had expanded capacity via the use of multiplex technology,106 and some firms owned expensive private lines, geographies of access absolutely continued to exist and possibly became more unequal. The new technology heightened the importance of time to economic activity. It shrunk the minimum economically-relevant duration of time from the quarter-hour to the minute or less. It allowed durations that previous generations would have ignored to become matters in which small fortunes were at stake.107 And in all this it refined the quantification of time that had begun in the factories, bringing it to an ever more specific and high-stakes position in the nineteenth-century US economy.

106 Simon Newton Dexter North, “Telephones and Telegraphs” (Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, 1906), table 9, p 103. For a description of the mechanics of multiplexing, see Christopher H. Sterling, Phyllis W. Bernt, and Martin B. H. Weiss, Shaping American Telecommunications: A History of Technology, Policy, and Economics (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 8– 10. 107 Nelson, The A B C of Options and Arbitrage, 56, AEV-0785. 128

129

Epilogue: Weighed, Counted, and Measured

“As the network of relations affecting men's lives each year became more tangled and more distended, Americans in a basic sense no longer knew who or where they were. The setting had altered beyond their power to understand it, and within an alien context they had lost themselves... For lack of anything that made better sense of their world, people everywhere weighed, counted, and measured it.” —Robert Wiebe, historian (1967)1

The Rhode Island Electric Protective Company was already selling time signals by 1893, when it contracted to more receive accurate time from Brown University’s Ladd Observatory.2 A master clock at Ladd Observatory with an electrical contact fixed to its pendulum beat sidereal time every second. It telegraphed the same simultaneously to the Providence Fire Department and RIEP. The director of Ladd told the University President, “The transmitting clock runs continuously, and its ticks are heard day and night in the main office of the Protective Co., which repeats the signals three times each day to the jewelers, and also controls thereby several hundred electric dials and regulators in various business offices. The time service thus inaugurated has given special satisfaction to the Protective Co. and its patrons.”3

As Alexis McCrossen and Ian Bartky have described, the late-nineteenth century United

States was a country increasingly fascinated by the idea of synchronizing clocks. For McCrossen, an optimistic if poorly-defined ideology of progress was at work, driving Americans to encourage

1 Wiebe, The Search for Order, 42–43. 2 Winslow Upton, “Report of the Professor of Astronomy and Curator of Ladd Observatory to the President of Brown University” (Report, Providence, RI, 1894). 3 Ibid. 130 astronomical observatories, naval observatories, and public timekeepers to continuously improve their timepieces.4 For Bartky the demand by scientists for accurate and precise timekeepers to use for their experiments drove developments in timekeeping technology, and the hunt by scientists for prestige and possibly patronage can be used to explain the popularization of high-end timekeeping services.5 Michael Umbricht, the current Ladd Observatory Curator, believes that practical necessity, whether it be the need to keep ships safe at sea, the need to keep trains separated on tracks, or the needs of fundamental science research ought to be preeminent in histories of the development of time services.6

The history of clock synchronization—in the United States context often referred to as time standardization—dates back to the 1840s and the first commercial railroads. Trains moved on fixed paths and moved significantly faster than earlier transportation methods had allowed.

Collisions were thus more likely and, when they occurred, more devastating.7 Efforts at establishing official times within cities, and then between multiple cities increased in intensity in the 1860s and ‘70s. The process culminated, though by no means inevitably, in 1883 when a group of US railroads agreed upon four time zones for the North American continent, each one- hour wide and bearing an integer relation to the meridian of the observatory at Greenwich,

England.8

By the time RIEP was founded standard time was an accepted convention, if a recent one. It had been ushered in by telegraph and railroad connections between major cities.

Standard mean time already was relatively easy to find in the urban core of the United States in

4 Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2013). 5 Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford University Press, 2000). 6 Author interview 7 See Bartky, Selling the True Time esp pp 20–30. 8 Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015), 26. 131 the last decade of the nineteenth century, but what RIEP promised was a high degree of accuracy.

As imperfect machines, clocks tend to run fast or slow, drifting slowly from correct time and running a few seconds ahead or behind. Higher quality clocks do this less. Still, adjusting one’s personal watch or clock to a more authoritative timepiece was a common experience for many Americans at the end of the nineteenth century. These authoritative time pieces were often public clocks on the facades of churches, government buildings, banks, and jewelers. For jewelers in particular, the ability to keep an accurate timepiece was a way of signaling mechanical facility more generally and timekeeping accuracy had been a professional virtue among jewelers since at least the late-eighteenth century.9

The most accurate time was kept by astronomical and meteorological observatories. The use of transit instruments—basically telescopes with crosshairs imposed onto the viewer’s vision—allowed astronomers to compare the observed position of stars at given moments in time with their expected position based on mathematical formulas. The astronomer would tap a telegraph key the moment the star crossed the vertical line of the crosshair and a register would record the instant the key was touched. Suppose, for example, a star was calculated to cross a certain arbitrary line in the sky at 8:32:23 P.M. on February 17, 1893. If, at the moment of the sighting, the clock at the observatory read 8:32:25 P.M., that would mean it was two seconds too fast and would need to be slowed by two seconds to be brought back to correct time. In 1888, five years before Ladd started its own time service, there were 18 observatories distributing local time signals in the United States, from Massachusetts to California.10

9 Carlene E. Stephens, “Partners in Time: William Bond & Son of Boston and the Harvard College Observatory,” Harvard Library Bulletin 35, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 351–84. 10 From Figure 15.1 in Bartky, Selling the True Time, 182. 132

Ladd’s founding director, Winslow Upton, seems to have used the time service and the revenue it brought to the University as an excuse to acquire more and better equipment, something he lobbied for constantly throughout his career at Brown.11 He insisted that the time service required a triple-redundant system of three astronomical regulators (high-quality clocks) to provide good service.12 RIEP also thought fit to play up its connection to a scientific institution and emblazoned its clocks with “Standard Time from the Ladd Observatory.” They advertised themselves as the origin point for standard time distribution in the city and boasted, “If You

Want Exactly Uniform Time on all the clocks of your factory or school house; if you want always correct time in your office; if you want a Big Outside Clock or an Automatic Time

Signal, this office can supply it.”13

Precision in timekeeping was highly sought-after in the late-nineteenth century United

States, and around the world. Timepieces were constantly being improved upon, and in research contexts the lengths that people would go in pursuit of precision could be extreme. Astronomical clocks were placed in isolation chambers to protect them from variations in ambient temperature and humidity, or in vacuum chambers that reduced the friction of air on the mechanisms and further reduced the impact of environmental variables. Pendulums could be constructed out of hollow cylinders filled with mercury, which would rise or lower in the cylinder and change the pendulum’s center of gravity to automatically counter the effects of changes in temperature.14 At the extreme, there was even an effort among astronomers to calculate their own ‘personal equations’—the average reaction time of the observer. In the world of personal equations each

11 Brown University, Treasurer’s Report (Knowles, Anthony & Company, 1887). 12 Upton, “Report of the Professor of Astronomy and Curator of Ladd Observatory to the President of Brown University.” 13 Rhode Island Electric Protective Company, “‘One Stitch in Time Saves Nine’ [Advertisement],” Providence Board of Trade Journal, May 1910, Rhode Island Historical Society. 14 Information based on interviews with Michael Umbricht and tours of Ladd Observatory conducted by author. 133 human observer could be assigned a single number, a fraction of a second that corresponded to the average time it took them to tap out a telegraphic signal after a visual stimulus reached their eye. These average errors could then be corrected for, both relative to other humans and relative to machines, to further improve accuracy. The personal equation made the human body an extension of the mechanical scientific apparatus.15

One is inclined to wonder whether all this fuss over precision was really necessary. In certain contexts, the answer appears to be yes. French scientist François Arago calculated in 1853 that errors on the order of a tenth of a second in astronomical calculations of longitude could accumulate to discrepancies of half a kilometer between the scientist’s map and the real world.16

For navigating tight waters, or planning military campaigns, this was no idle concern.

But in other contexts the answer appears to be no, precision on the order of a tenth of a second was not particularly necessary. In a nineteenth century world of unstable banks, overleveraged and unable to cover their debts, a lobby clock accurate to a half-second or quarter- second is an empty gesture. In a nineteenth century financial market propelled by inside information, various forms of collusion, and rumor, and tossed around by the weight of a small number of its largest participants, speed can only have relative importance. Being faster, in absolute terms, cannot improve financial outcomes. Given the number and magnitude of uncontrollable external factors that affected the pace of industrial production and distribution, the needfulness of measuring workers and work at the order of seconds or even fractions of seconds is doubtful.

More than likely, the emergence of ‘industrial physiology’ in France in the late-nineteenth century and ‘scientific management’ in the late-nineteenth century United States were not

15 Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second : A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 6. 16 Ibid., 31. 134

responses to any radical changes in the technological or financial pressures on manufacturing.

They were choices, half-formed ideologies, about the way work and production can and should

be organized. They shifted the focus of managerial expertise from the social organization of the

workplace and the labor-capital power struggle to the allegedly ‘technical’ problems of the

human body, and how its productivity could be maximized in an industrial setting.17 The

Figure13: Chronophotograph of workers striking a hammer made by French physiologist E.J. Marey and engineer Charles Fremont. Photographs like these were used to study and dissect the movements made by workers, and to break up motions into their constitutive elements. “Hitting Directly,” 1894. Image from Braun, Picturing Time, 325.

representation of the worker’s body as a motor, consuming calories and outputting joules of

energy, was politically loaded, and historians have rightly interpreted it as yet a further

imposition of disciplinary ideologies onto human bodies at the turn of the century.18

17 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, (University of California Press, 1992), 10–11; Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Jules Amar, The Human Motor: Or, the Scientific Foundations of Labour and Industry (Routledge, 1920), 259–260, 426, 447. 18 Sharon L. Corwin, "Picturing efficiency: precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor," Representations 84, no. 1 (2003): 139-165; Scott Curtis, “Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank B. Gilbreth,” in Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, edited by Vinzenz Hediger and 135

They were also trends in industrial organization that depended upon technologies that could track and measure time, and surveil individuals within grids of time. It was in large part these technologies, and the authority they could extended to their authorized users, that allowed these managers to claim expertise and a specialized set of methodologies for the production of superior knowledge.

The development of the ‘science’ of management in the twentieth century has received much scholarly and popular attention, as has the radical increase in speed computerized trading has brought to finance in the last three decades. The two developments share a common nineteenth century pre-history in the objectification of time and the reorganization of workplaces, cities, and market institutions around the new temporality. It is only by re- politicizing time, timekeeping, and speed that we will be able to push back the boundaries of the expert’s mandate. And once we do that we can begin to have the debate that we need, and that we owe ourselves, about the structuration of our economic and social lives.

Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Brian Price, “Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and the motion study controversy, 1907-1930,” Frank and Lillian Gilbreth: Critical Evaluations in Business and Management 2 (2003); Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) 136

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