Clock Towers and the Revolution of Time

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. — Lewis Mumford

The Clockmaker Who Beat Newton

I once happened to catch an episode of Luoji Siwei (a Chinese knowledge podcast) called "The Clockmaker Who Beat Newton." It tells the story of a clockmaker who built a highly accurate timepiece that made it possible to fix a ship's position at sea, giving a huge boost to navigation.

In fact, the story of clocks goes well beyond that. Determining longitude and advancing navigation was certainly a major event in human history, but compared with the role clocks played from the 10th to the 20th century, it is only the tip of the iceberg. It's just that the clock's other effects are almost "transparent" to us. Only after the philosophy of technology took shape did the veil slowly start to lift.

This post starts with the clock tower and briefly walks through some of the other stories of the clock, the spokesman for time.

Clock Towers Everywhere

Even today, we can still see clock towers in older big cities; they have long stood on university campuses and in churches. Even some newer cities put up a clock tower in a few key spots to remind people of the time.

The clock tower is a public timekeeping device. It appeared around the late 13th to early 14th century and quickly became a standard building in churches and universities. In monasteries and universities, people were required to arrange their daily activities strictly by the clock: prayers, services, meals and so on in a monastery all followed a strict rhythm and order.

In fact, if the clock tower was the product of people gathering into cities and needing to organize their lives and coordinate their activities, then monasteries already had timekeeping devices around the 10th century, well before clock towers appeared. Legend has it that a monk named Gerbert invented a mechanical water clock in the late 10th century. Regularity, order and punctuality were almost the natural requirements of monastic life, and they kept getting stronger over time. (See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization.)

With the mechanical clock tower, timekeeping was no longer at the mercy of the weather. Water freezes, and the sun, moon and stars get covered up; a mechanical clock has none of these weaknesses and can run fairly reliably in all kinds of natural conditions. So it was quickly adopted by churches and monasteries, and later by the universities that emerged.

The meaning of the clock tower, and its disappearance
As mentioned above, the clock tower is a public timekeeping device, and it carries its own norms from birth: regularity, order, punctuality, and the quantification of time, something you can neither see nor touch.

A clock tower can coordinate and constrain human production and life over a wide area, so that all kinds of activities proceed in order. Inside churches and monasteries, its effect may have been strict prayers and services, a code of conduct in the religious sense. But once it left the church and entered the city, this clock-driven norm of punctuality and order coordinated human production and gradually brought the notion of time into the human world.

One effect of this notion of time is that it raises the efficiency of human production (before the "concept of efficiency" was born, efficiency itself already existed and was being strengthened, consciously or not). This in turn kept pushing the clockmaking trade forward.

A heavy timekeeping device like a clock tower usually served a whole large area, which was not very convenient. As clockmaking kept improving, especially after the invention of the mainspring in the 15th century, there was finally a technical basis for making clocks smaller. They shrank, and small table clocks began to enter people's homes. As clockmaking grew more precise and cheaper, this kind of timekeeping device began to spread.

The Revolution of Time

Some historians believe that in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, another revolution had already been quietly under way: the so-called "revolution in the notion of time," or the "efficiency revolution." The changes it brought became the foundation of the Industrial Revolution.

The revolution of time can be traced, roughly, to the point when clocks became fully woven into human life. When people began to leave behind the primitive "relative notion of time," that is, sensing the passage of time entirely through the sun, moon, stars and the turning of the seasons, and adopted an artificial, mechanical means of keeping time, the revolution of time began. Time was no longer the unfolding and change of things; it became something independent, something that could be measured and quantified.

People began to mark time off according to the clock, ever more precisely. The introduction of hours, minutes and seconds made people clearly feel the passing of "time," and the important role time plays in daily life and in commerce. As commerce developed, producing more resources within a given time became an absolute pursuit. By then, the idea of "efficiency" had already begun to sprout.

People kept finding ways to raise efficiency: improving production processes, reforming production management, adopting new technologies, and so on. It was in this environment that the Industrial Revolution found soil in which to germinate.

Time Is Money

Today, "time is money" has become an everyday metaphor. In our culture, time has become a precious commodity, a limited resource we need to reach our goals. People are paid by the hour or the week, and phone calls are billed even more precisely, by the minute. We have borrowed a lot of money vocabulary to talk about time: time is something you can spend, waste, budget, invest, save or squander. In short, the notion of time has rebuilt the basic behavior of our daily lives and the way we understand the world.

All of this started with clock towers and other man-made timekeeping devices that run independently of nature.