I'm Steve Anderson, and in this video essay I'll be discussing history and time.
This video essay is about 10 minutes in length, and by the end we should have a good understanding
of the ways that societies have viewed the concept of time throughout history.
Studying how societies view time can help us understand them more fully, and it can
give us a better view of our own society as well.
In this video clip from the movie 1492 Conquest of Paradise, a giant bell is being hoisted
into the new church built by Christopher Columbus.
The bell will ring throughout each day, giving the time for meals and prayers, as well as
for work and labor.
The bell is an instrument of Christianity within the church, and it is also an instrument
of colonialism, imperialism, and even capitalism.
This bell will restructure the lives of the indigenous peoples laboring for Columbus and
the Spanish Empire, and it will reinforce what it means to be Christian for other Spaniards
living in the new world.
This image is from a book of hours, which is a collection of prayers and the times
of day they should be said.
This image comes from a French book, created just before Columbus sailed for the new world.
These books were designed to help people keep track of their daily lives, which for many
in this era included agricultural labor.
With this image we're at our first point of reference for understanding historical time.
This image represents God's time, which can also be called agricultural or natural time.
It relies on the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, and the rhythms of nature.
The second type of time we'll be discussing, called machine time, or railroad time, comes
into effect with the Industrial Revolution across the 1700s and 1800s, and the processes
of mechanization and mass production.
With the advent of the railroad, God's time could no longer keep pace, and it was far
from accurate.
When railroad conductors arrived in other places, they might see that their own watches
were 30 minutes different from the clocks in that town.
That would make it quite difficult to keep a schedule, especially considering how many
new routes were being developed to ship both goods and people to distant places.
In addition to the problem of accuracy with nearby towns, far away cities could be experiencing
different times of day.
It might have been midday in Chicago at the same time it was afternoon in New York.
Time zones such as Eastern, Central, and Pacific Standard were invented by the railroads to
help remedy this disparity.
Time we tend to take for granted now.
In the early 1900s, a peculiar thing about time was discovered by Albert Einstein.
Until Einstein's theories of relativity, time was thought to be fixed.
A minute was always a minute, no matter where you were or how fast you were traveling, and
it had been this way since the time of Isaac Newton.
With Einstein's new theories, however, time was seen as fluid and somewhat messy.
Space and time were intermixed and subject to unseen forces that helped shape the universe.
In 1931, the surrealist painter Salvador Dali created The Persistence of Memory, a painting
that destroys the supposed fixity and deterministic qualities of time.
Dali's painting shows pocket watches or small clocks melting amidst a dreamscape.
The watches have lost all function, and yet they still exist, perhaps in a state of decay
with flies and ants testing and inspecting their surfaces.
For hundreds of years, time was seen as invariable and changeless, and suddenly it became nearly
unknowable.
To help remedy the uncertainty of time, synchronization has become more and more important in modern
society.
What time do we synchronize our watches to?
What time is it now?
You've got French time.
May it'll be midnight in 15 seconds.
Good.
Synchronizing watches worked well for small groups of people, but what about larger groups?
Columbus's bell provided synchronization in the New World, and the bell tower shown here
at UC Riverside incorporates both bells and a clock.
The UCR bell tower is a hybrid timekeeper, a method for synchronizing the pace and movements
of an entire university campus.
The bell tower was constructed in the 1960s, and its multiple bells, which form a musical
instrument called a carillon, are rung throughout the day.
For the person operating the carillon, which is sort of like an organ with bells instead
of pipes, the bell tower provides a commanding view of the campus and the surrounding area.
A few students at UCR have even joked that it reminds them of the Eye of Sauron in Lord
of the Rings, a tower used for synchronization as well as surveillance.
There's a more benign tower in London that you might be familiar with, Big Ben, which
is actually the name of the Great Bell inside the Elizabeth Tower.
As we move through our lecture here, you may notice we remember other timepieces, bells
and clock towers, and especially the familiar notion of time always running out, even in
fairy tales.
Everyone should know the day this photo was taken.
It's a satellite image of Manhattan, New York on September 11th, 2001, a moment in
history where everything seemed to change, but why?
And what does 9-11 have to do with time, bells, and towers?
Before the terrorist attacks, the World Trade Center consisted of two towers, known as the
Twin Towers.
While there were no bells at rung or giant clocks on the sides of these buildings, these
structures still operated as instruments of synchronization.
The Twin Towers were at the heart of Wall Street, tied directly into digital networks
of global finance.
When the terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and the Twin Towers, they were attempting
to destroy a system of synchronization.
The terrorist attacks of 9-11 only happened in the United States, but their impact on
world markets reverberated across the globe.
This brings us to the third and last type of time we'll be discussing, atomic or digital
time.
Most so-called atomic clocks we see on a daily basis, like the one here on the right side
of the image, are actually just radio receivers.
Real atomic clocks are delicate scientific instruments, like the enormous device on the
left.
Atomic clocks were invented in the 1940s using the oscillations of atomic particles for incredibly
accurate timekeeping.
Around the same time that atomic clocks were developed, the digital computer was invented,
and mainframe computers such as the Univac shown here helped bring the United States,
as well as the rest of the world, into the digital age.
But what happens when atomic clocks and digital computers are used in conjunction with one
another?
How would regular consumers and everyday people experience the accuracy of digital time?
Smartphones like the iPhone and Android are the way most people experience the network
effects of digital synchronization these days.
Apple's iPhones and Google's Android devices are manufactured in the millions and millions
and distributed throughout the world.
Like the UCR Bell Tower, this tower is also a hybrid.
Other than bells and a clock though, this tower, or cell tower, has a clock and wireless
networking equipment.
Cell towers are literally everywhere, especially in urban areas.
Perhaps it's the ubiquitous nature of the cell tower that makes people want to disguise
them, however poorly.
Perhaps we've moved too far from God's time and through the uncertainty of machine time,
and the camouflage of cell towers as pine trees and palm trees is an attempt to move
back to nature, or maybe even, as with this cell tower, closer to God.
