Techno-Politics and Technologies of Time in the 19Th Century US Economy”
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“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 5 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. 7 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 8 9 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