“The Most Reliable Time”: William Bond, the New England Railroads, and Time Awareness in 19th-Century America

Abstract

“The Most Reliable Time”: William Bond, the New England Railroads, and Time Awareness in 19th-Century America CARLENE STEPHENS It is a truism that modern American life runs by the clock. Clocks synchronize our communal activities, and that they do so is at once useful and tyrannical. As fundamental as this duality is, though, pre­ cisely how it came to govern our lives has yet to be explained in a comprehensive way. Fragmentary evidence hints at the story’s com­ plexity. A vast literature on clocks and watches exists, but that liter­ ature generally slants toward the stylistic interests of the collector. Other clues have surfaced in studies of American factory discipline and scientific management’s time-and-motion studies. Still, we have no solid study of the interaction of timekeeping technology with the way 19th-century Americans experienced time.1 Ms. Stephens, a curator in the Division of Engineering and Industry, National Mu­ seum of American History, completed the research for this article under a Smithsonian Scholarly Studies grant. She thanks Ian Bartky for bringing the subject of railroad time to her attention; John H. White, Jr., for generously providing encouragement and valuable sources; Frances Robb, Colleen Dunlavy, Michael O’Malley, and Steven Lubar for reading the manuscript and suggesting improvements; and J. P. Roan and Moira Thomas for research assistance. 'In contrast, the relationship of the clock to time awareness in other places, especially medieval and Renaissance Europe, has received considerable attention, not only from historians but also from anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers. In his analysis of Thoreau’s Walden, Leo Marx identified, but did not elaborate on, the connection between American industrialization and time consciousness (The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America [London, 1978], p. 248). The most recent analysis to integrate timekeeping technology and its social consequences, with an em­ phasis on Western Europe, is David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 26-28, 59-66, 71-72, 89-91, 22728 . The classic essay on time and the factory is E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 56—97. For details on the introduction of time studies and Taylorism, see, e.g., Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison, Wis., 1980), pp. 41—44.© 1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3001 -0003$01.00 1 2 Carlene Stephens As a step toward explaining the interaction, this article offers a revealing episode from the middle of the 19th century. Science, tech­ nology, and commerce intersect in the story of how William Cranch Bond—first director of the Harvard College Observatory and owner of a lucrative instrument supply firm in Boston—supplied “the most reliable time” to the railroads emanating from that city. (See fig. 1.) To insure accurate and uniform time for railroad operations, Bond and the New England railroads instituted an unprecedented system of coordinated measures in the short span of four years. Together, Bond and the railroads imposed a regional standard time on New England, operated a time service based on telegraphed signals, and adopted an enforceable inspection system for railroad timekeepers. This partnership between the observatory and the railroad had several remarkable consequences. First of all, by supplying time to the surrounding countryside, Bond created a new social role for the observatory, traditionally an institution focused on scientific research rather than community service. Also, by distributing time regionally, not just to Boston, Bond and the New England railroads laid the groundwork for a uniform national standard time, a system put into effect thirty-five years later. Examined together, these precedents illuminate the formation of a new kind of time sense in industrializing America. The relationship between Bond and the railroads provides some of the first direct evidence of how the railroads enforced scheduled operations and became clock-conscious. This clock-consciousness helps to explain how the new technologies in transportation and communication affected the people using them. This new way of experiencing time crept gradually into everyday community life in the 19th century. Railroad time was, of...