Time Telling through the Ages

by Harry Chase Brearley

The modern man—every man—is something like Aladdin, only he is much more powerful. He has the genie of steam to work for him when he pulls the lever, and the genie of electricity ready to serve him if he but press a button. He has many other mighty servants that modern science has given to him, but greatest of all, most useful of all, is the Slave of the Watch which lies in his pocket—mighty Time himself.

This ability to record time and therefore, to control it, is perhaps the greatest of all man's triumphs. Only see what it has done for him! Have you ever thought of yourself as a person of no special importance?—why, you have far more actual power than was possessed by Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Charlemagne!

You can command forces and can accomplish results that would have made any of these proud autocrats stare in wonder. If you do not stand out above your age, as they did above their ages, it is simply because millions of other people besides yourself also possess these powers. It is undoubtedly true that we are to-day a race of giants, and it is also true that each of our powers is directly or indirectly due to the common fact that we all can keep track of time. For consider that what mankind can accomplish to-day depends upon the ability of people to work together, and that working together would cease if people had no accurate means for telling time.

For example, you make a railway journey upon a matter of importance to you. The first thing that you do is to examine a time-table on which is shown the minute when the train is due to leave. You calculate to yourself how many minutes you must allow for reaching the station, and then look at your watch to see how long you will still have for other work. If you had not watch or clock, or you were dependent merely upon the position of the sun, you might go to the station several hours ahead of time in order to be "on the safe side." During the hours thus saved you can accomplish a great deal of work. It is as though your day had been made several hours longer.

Unseen in your pocket, your watch ticks steadily. You trust it absolutely, and you know that it will be faithful to its trust. Occasionally you glance at it and, when the hand reached the limit of safety, you start for the train. You reach the station three or four minutes before train-time and find the tracks clear; no train is in sight.

This however, does not cause you the least uneasiness. You merely take your watch from your pocket and look expectantly up the line. Perhaps a minute before the train is due, you hear a distant whistle, then the approaching roar of wheels upon the rails, and, just as the watch-hand reaches the proper moment, the train itself whirls round the curve and draws up to the station, exactly on time.

As you proceed upon your way, you notice how other people at other stations are also meeting their schedules and conserving their time. You see the conductor glance at his watch as he gives the engineer the starting-signal. You realize that the whole transportation system is merely an enormous piece of clockwork and that it, in turn, is a part of the vaster clockwork of modern civilization.

Turn where you will, there is nothing that you can do and nothing that you can use which is not dependent upon the ticking of clockwork. The locomotive which pulls your train, the cars in which you ride, the rails over which you pass, all of these are products of factories, but the factories are run upon the time-basis; there is no other way in which they could be run.

The workmen in these factories leave their records upon time-clocks when they come and when they go. If the workmen were not there at the same time, the work could not be done, since most of modern work depends upon the ability of people to work together at the same task. Even if one man were late, it might lose time for many. The clothes that you wear come from other factories where other workmen have time-clocks and watches. The buildings that you see from the windows were put up on the time-basis and were paid for according to the movement of the hands upon watch dials.