Lapham's Quarterly: Time

Lapham's Quarterly 7.4 (Fall 2014): "Time."

Among much else, the issue deals with clocks and the movement through time and marking of time by humans and other creatures. Several of the many brief entries provide a good introduction to time and mechanism, and other issues in or in the background of relevant SF.

• "Marking Time" (pp. [10-11]): Includes a time-line for Earth from the Big Bang to the present — necessarily not to scale and greatly compressed — along with a brief time-line for the development of time-measuring devices (in a wide sense of "device") from a lunar calendar of twelve pits from the Mesolithic period through an ancient water clock to the mechanical clock to the atomic.

=================

• "Captain Clock" by Lewis H. Lapham (pp. 13-[21]) is important for time and mechanism vs. organism as organizing principles. Latham notes that "Only a small fraction of mankind's time on earth (maybe 800 or the last 200,000 years) has been spent in the close company of mechanical clocks, remanded to the cursory of a machine unrelated to anything other than itself. That the association has not proved to be a happy one is the conclusion drawn by Jay Griffiths [...] from her researches among peoples native to" a wide varieties of homelands, and as Lapham sees suggested in the ancient history of the West (pp. 15-16).

The perfecting of mechanical clocks in Europe takes place over the five centuries encompassing the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the scientific and industrial revolutions, their [...] authority established by the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler ("The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism, but rather to a clockwork"), and by [...]Isaac Newton [...] ("Absolute, true, and mathematical time [...] flows equably without relation to anything external"). French Jesuit missionaries bring Christianity into the seventeenth-century North American wilderness taught the Huron to recognize the will of God in the face of "Captain Clock"; so in nineteenth-century Europe, while the universal and uniform time shifted from the biosphere to the technosphere, the Captain's coercive omnipresence facilitated the transfer of political power from the landed aristocracy and the cloistered clergy to the bourgeois captains of industry and finance. ¶ Money and time on the clock are both inanimate abstractions, nowhere to be found [...] in the living body of time that is the existence of man and nature. (p. 17)

The essay goes on to discuss briefly Frederik W. Taylor as "'the father of scientific management,'" though without mentioning his Scientific Management book. And then notes Lewis Mumford's naming of "the clock, not the steam engine or printing press, as 'the key machine of the modern industrial age'" and how clocks "'dissociated time from human events'" (Lapham, quoting New York City, p. 71; Wikipedia citing Technics and Civilization [1934: 14-15]).[1]

[...] Taylor's template for an efficient workplace appeared during the same few decades around the turn of the twentieth century that also vastly extended the powers of machine-made time to levy taxes, amass capital, declare war. The speeding up of time by telegraph and telephone, on radio and film, with fast-moving automobiles, airplanes, and artillery shells depended for its supremacy on Newton's conception of absolute, true, mathematical time [...]. (p. 18)

— An arguable assertion of that dependency, but an introduction to Lapham's section on the challenge to Newtonian mechanical time by the works of Albert Einstein and succeeding philosophers and artists in various media (Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Picasso et al.).

=================

• "1903: Philadelphia: Time-Management Skills (pp.27-28, excerpt from Taylor's Shop Management.

Boxed text at the end notes the 1911 Principles of Scientific Management and how (italics removed), "In the 1870s and 1880s Taylor rose from machinist to chief engineer at the Middle Steel company, where he first developed what he termed 'time study,' using stopwatches to determine the most efficient uses of men and machines." The brief article itself alludes to the stopwatches of time study but in itself mentions no mechanism more complex than a wheelbarrow. See, though, for Taylor's concentrated concern for — arguably contempt of — "The natural laziness of men" and what can come across as total dedication to the interests of management as opposed to what Taylor barely recognizes as the interests of laborers.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 6Mar20 f.