Pride of Precision – Part 2
Bringing the gift of timekeeping to all.
There was a time when there was no widely available means to tell time, or to tell time in any sort of precise manner suitable for organizing human activity. In ancient Greece, there existed a sophisticated mechanical device, since recovered from a sunken ship, that was used to track the movements of stars. But as Simon Winchester writes in his book The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World:
[While the device] was filled to bursting with what is self-evidently a complicated assemblage of clockwork, none of its assemblers apparently ever thought of using it as a clock … [T]hough the Greeks possessed (as we now know from the existence of the mechanism) the wherewithal to harness clockwork gears and make them into timekeepers, they never did so. The penny never dropped. It never dropped for the Greeks or, subsequently, for the Arabs or, even beforehand, for the much more venerable civilizations of the East. It would take many more centuries for mechanical clocks to be invented anywhere, but once they were, they would have precision as their most essential component.
Indeed, the Chinese were initially historic leaders in the field of the mass production of precision components. As recounted by W. Bernard Carlson in his Great Courses series Understanding the Inventions that Changed the World, the Chinese developed the first significant precision-made interchangeable part over 2,000 years ago: a remarkable bronze trigger mechanism for a crossbow that was produced so precisely that any time a trigger broke during battle, another identical one could be quickly popped in to take its place so the crossbow could keep up its rapid rate of fire. This technological innovation allowed the Chinese to efficiently fend off hordes of invaders for centuries. Yet, by the fifteenth century, the Chinese had become resistant to further innovations they saw as “Western,” and one of those innovations was the clock.
As David Landes described in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, both the Chinese and the Muslim nations chose to deny the gift of shared time to their own citizens:
Chinese horology [the study and measurement of time] regressed and stagnated. It never got beyond water clocks, and by the time China came to know the Western mechanical clock, it was badly placed to understand and copy it. Not for want of interest: the Chinese imperial court and wealthy elites were wild about these machines; but because they were reluctant to acknowledge European technological superiority, they sought to trivialize them as toys. Big mistake. Islam might also have sought to possess and copy the clock, if only to fix prayers. And as in China, Muslim horologers made water clocks well in advance of anything known in Europe … Like the Chinese, the Muslims were much taken with Western clocks and watches, doing their best to acquire them by purchase or tribute. But they never used them to create a public sense of time other than as a call to prayer. We have the testimony here of Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople, in a letter of 1560: “… if they established public clocks, they think that the authority of their muezzins and their ancient rites would suffer diminution.”
Because in the East clocks were reserved for the elite, the clock-tinkering culture of the sort European craftsmen came to employ never took root:
the Chinese, who would not give up clocks, who wanted clocks, trivialized them as toys, which for many they were; or as nonfunctional symbols of status, inaccessible to hoi polloi. Premodern imperial China did not think of time knowledge as a right. Time belonged to the authorities, who sounded (proclaimed) the hour, and a personal timepiece was a rare privilege. As a result, although the imperial court set up workshops to make clocks and got their Jesuit clockmakers to train some native talent, these Chinese makers never matched Western horologists -- for want of the best teachers and lack of commercial competition and emulation. Imperial China never had a clockmaking trade like Europe’s.
But in the West the tradition of backyard tinkering with mechanical objects took off, and a revolution came again in Massachusetts, but this time of a timekeeping sort. As Steven Johnson writes in How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World:
That power to measure time was not distributed evenly through society: pocket watches remained luxury items until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a Massachusetts cobbler’s son named Aaron Dennison borrowed the new process of manufacturing armaments using standardized, interchangeable parts and applied the same techniques to watchmaking. At the time, the production of advanced watches involved more than a hundred distinct jobs: one person would make individual flea-sized screws, by turning a piece of steel on a thread; another would inscribe watch cases; and so on. Dennison had a vision of machines mass-producing identical tiny screws that could then be put into any watch of the same model, and machines that would engrave cases at precision speed. His vision took him through a bankruptcy or two, and earned him the nickname “the Lunatic of Boston” in the local press. But eventually, in the early 1860s, he hit on the idea of making a cheaper watch, without the conventional jeweled ornamentation that traditionally adorned pocket watches. It would be the first watch targeted at the mass market, not just the well-to-do. Dennison’s “Wm. [William] Ellery” watch -- named after one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, William Ellery -- became a breakout hit, particularly with the soldiers of the Civil War.
I got one such “William Ellery” watch, made at the Walthmam, Massachusetts factory, off eBay. It’s broken, but in a good way in that its back is exposed so you can see the amazingly intricate workings of the device, remarkable for its production in the late 1800’s.
As Johnson continues:
More than 160,000 watches were sold; even Abraham Lincoln owned and carried a “Wm. Ellery” watch. Dennison turned a luxury item into a must-have commodity. In 1850, the average pocket watch cost $40; by 1878, a Dennison unjeweled watch cost just $3.50.
And it was only when pocket watches became widely available did mass transit become a practical possibility. As Johnson writes, in the early 1880’s:
a railroad engineer named William F. Allen took on the cause. As the editor of a guide to railroad timetables, Allen knew firsthand how Byzantine the existing time system was. At a railroad convention in St. Louis in 1883, Allen presented a map that proposed a shift from fifty distinct railroad times to the four time zones that are still in use, more than a century later: Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific. Allen designed the map so that the divisions between time zones zigzagged slightly to correspond to the points where the major railroad lines connected, instead of having the divisions run straight down meridian lines.
Without these innovations, goods could not be promptly or reliably delivered. In effect, the creation of time zones and a unified means of determining time created the modern commercial system for transporting goods. As Winchester writes:
On land, it was the railways that most prolifically showed -- one might say defined -- the employment of time. The enormous station clock was more glanced at than any other feature of the building; the image of the conductor consulting his (Elgin, Hamilton, Ball, or Waltham) pocket watch remains iconic. The timetable became a biblically important volume in all libraries and some households; the concept of time zones and their application to cartography all stemmed from railways’ imprint of timekeeping on human society.
And with mass transport came the availability of consumer goods for the masses. As Johnson writes:
With watches spiking in popularity across the country, a Minnesota railroad agent named Richard Warren Sears stumbled across a box of unwanted watches from a local jeweler, and turned a tidy profit selling them to other station agents. Inspired by his success, he partnered with a Chicago businessman named Alvah Roebuck, and together they launched a mail-order publication showcasing a range of watch designs: the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Those fifteen pounds of mail-order catalogs currently weighing down your mailbox? They all started with the must-have gadget of the late nineteenth century: the consumer-grade pocket watch.
From the drive to create smaller and smaller, yet ever more fine-tuned mechanical parts came humanity’s freedom to coordinate with others everywhere. The profound influence of the simple pocket watch is summarized by Landes as follows:
[T]he clock brought order and control, both collective and personal. Its public display and private possession laid the basis for temporal autonomy: people could now coordinate comings and goings without dictation from above. (Contrast the military, where only officers need know the time.) The clock provided the punctuation marks for group activity, while enabling individuals to order their own work (and that of others) so as to enhance productivity. Indeed, the very notion of productivity is a by-product of the clock: once one can relate performance to uniform time units, work is never the same. One moves from the task-oriented time consciousness of the peasant (one job after another, as time and light permit) and the time-filling busyness of the domestic servant (always something to do) to an effort to maximize product per unit of time (time is money). The invention of the mechanical clock anticipates in its effects the economic analysis of Adam Smith: increase in the wealth of nations derives directly from improvement of the productive powers of labor. The mechanical clock remained a European (Western) monopoly for some three hundred years; in its higher forms, right into the twentieth century. Other civilizations admired and coveted clocks, or more accurately, their rulers and elites did; but none could make them to European standard.
In the next essay, we’ll see how those European standards of precision came to be embraced by a country that separated from England and unleashed yet more opportunities for progress by its citizens. That country was America, and its innovations in precision engineering went on to fine-tune the modern world.
Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4