Clocks and Men

When the sundial became established in the West, complaints from traditionalists were not long in coming. Around 200 BC, in a play by Plautus, the Roman comic playwright, one character protested: “May the gods curse the first man who discovered how to mark the hours! And may they also curse the man who set up a sundial in this place, so infamously cutting my days into tiny pieces!” That glutton complained that, when he was a child, his little belly had been his clock, a reliable and truthful guide for knowing when to demand food, whereas now he had to wait until those accursed devices allowed him to eat. The clock appeared as an intruder into natural cycles, something that linked time with human events.

The automatic clock appeared during the Renaissance. There is little awareness of the revolution it produced. It was the most eminent machine among modern devices, even more significant than the steam engine itself. David Landes, professor of History and Economics at Harvard, who in 1969 had written the most comprehensive study of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution, centred on Watt’s steam engine, published another masterful volume in 1987 analysing the influence of the clock on the modern world. He regarded it as one of the greatest inventions in human history—not on the same level as fire or the wheel, but comparable to Gutenberg’s movable type in terms of its revolutionary implications for cultural values, technological change, social and political organisation, and personality. Let us examine some of the reasons.

First, there was its enormous technological potential. It became the model to which all machines aspired and the workshop in which skilled craftsmen and precise technicians were trained. Precisely because it was not originally a practical tool designed for a single purpose, it was destined to become the mother of machines. Since clockmakers produced the first modern measuring devices, they became pioneers in the manufacture of scientific instruments. Their lasting legacy was machine-tool technology.

Second, there was its importance in shaping a new vision of the world: the metaphor of the Universe as a vast piece of clockwork. In the seventeenth century, the physicist Robert Boyle, founder of the Royal Society and a pioneer of the science of his time, viewed the Cosmos as “a great piece of clockwork.” From the eighteenth century onward, Europeans would change their conception of the Universe: it would no longer be geocentric but heliocentric, no longer organic but mechanical, and the sciences would become part of Newton’s mechanistic ideal. Even God would come to be conceived as the Great Universal Clockmaker.

Third, there was its political influence. The invention of the mechanical clock was one of the greatest changes that transformed Europe from a weak, peripheral and highly vulnerable stronghold of Mediterranean civilisation into an aggressive, hegemonic power. It formed part of a broad and far-reaching phenomenon that it also helped to shape: quantification as a distinctive characteristic of modernity.

An extreme thesis is currently advanced by Alfred Crosby: because, in the sixteenth century, more people in Western Europe were thinking quantitatively than anywhere else in the world, Europeans became world leaders. By perceiving time, space and objects mathematically, they became intellectual imperialists in science, technology, bureaucracy, music and painting.

Its Industrial Importance

Around 1600, Switzerland received groups of refugees—French Huguenots—who founded a manufacturing industry that gradually prospered until it gave the country an undisputed monopoly lasting two centuries. The Swiss later withstood the challenge posed by the Americans. However, beginning in the 1970s, the “Quartz Revolution”—a new technology based on the piezoelectric properties of certain crystals—placed them first behind the Japanese and later behind industries based in Hong Kong.

To confront this new technology, which had caught them by surprise, the Swiss responded, among other measures, by manufacturing and appropriately marketing watches for millionaires. In the most expensive watch segment, Japanese buyers and wealthy people from around the world began travelling to Geneva in search of the Patek Philippe—“A watch that tells you about yourself”—the Vacheron Constantin—“A precious and rare work of art”—or the Audemars Piaget—“The most expensive watch in the world.”

In addition to ordinary watches, the Swiss now sell large numbers of pieces priced at up to twenty thousand dollars. Nevertheless, they paid a high price for their delay in adapting to the quartz revolution.

The Influence of the Clock on Customs and Natural Cycles

During the Middle Ages, the first clocks to make themselves heard were those of monasteries: weight-driven machines that rang bells to announce the thirteen canonical hours and the working day. Later came the clocks installed in church bell towers. In the medieval European city, bells performed the function that radio fulfils in our own time.

Every city that considered itself worthy of the name needed a public clock to summon its citizens for defence, celebrations and mourning. There were magnificent and famous calendar and spectacle clocks. One example was the planetary clock of Strasbourg, considered one of the Seven Wonders of Germany.

The greatest revolution, however, came with the modern clock: time became portable and began regulating people day and night, under cloudy or clear skies, in every season. Once clockmakers learned to replace weights and counterweights with a compressed spring, the clock became self-contained, miniaturised and portable, useful and even indispensable for households and individuals.

The possibility of continuous private use laid the foundations for a new discipline of time and introduced a new value into human life: “punctuality,” the strict observance of the appointed hour. It created a civilisation attentive to the passage of time, the operation of things and productivity. The word used to describe the habit of arriving on time appeared only toward the end of the eighteenth century.

The clock, having become the master and ruler of everyday life across the planet, produced its own morality. Punctuality is its creation.