On the clock: How the clock became king

At 10 years old, Madeline was becoming a little obsessed with her alarm clock. So her mom took it away. 

But Madeline isn’t alone. Maybe you just glanced at a timepiece on your wall, your wrist, or your car dashboard. Or maybe you just checked the time on your computer or your phone, as it queries an internet server synced with a global network of 400 atomic clocks.

We’re all glued to the clock, in one way or another. 

In Episode 4 of the Monitor’s six-part podcast series, “It’s About Time,” hosts Rebecca Asoulin and Eoin O’Carroll look at how the clock became king – and how it shifted Western culture, for better or worse. 

Timekeeping historian Alexis McCrossen traces that history. Some scholars, she says, viewed clock time as “an oppressive force that drained people of their vitality, that monetized time, and that gave those with power much more power.” But timekeepers also allow people to organize their lives and build a society. “If I wanted to live as a hermit, I can live without clocks and watches,” she says. 

For Dawna Ballard, a communications expert who studies time and work, the key is in recognizing when to rely on clocks, and when to go outside clock time to protect the things we value. 

“Time isn’t a clock,” Dr. Ballard says. “Time is an agreement. We decide what time is.”

This is Episode 4 of a six-part series that’s part of the Monitor’s “Rethinking the News” podcast. To listen to the other episodes on our site or on your favorite podcast player, please visit the “It’s About Time” series page.

This audio story was designed to be heard. We strongly encourage you to experience it with your ears, but we understand that is not an option for everybody. You can find the audio player above. For those who are unable to listen, we have provided a transcript of the story below.

Audio Transcript

Jessica Mendoza: Welcome to “Rethinking the News” by The Christian Science Monitor. I’m Jessica Mendoza, one of the producers. Today, we’re sharing Episode 4 of our science series, “It’s About Time,” hosted by Rebecca Asoulin and Eoin O’Carroll. And don’t forget to check out our previous episodes if you haven’t listened to them! Let’s get started. 

[Music]

Rebecca Asoulin: Is there anything that you don’t like about clocks?  Madeline Hanes: Well, it means that mommy and daddy get to say when it’s bedtime. [Music]My name is Madeline.  And my favorite food is blueberry pie with French vanilla ice cream. 

Eoin O’Carroll: It was Week One of the pandemic lockdown, and Madeline’s mom was worried. Madeline, who’s now 10, was getting too obsessed with clocks, and maybe even with time itself. So Madeline’s mom removed the clocks from all of their bedrooms in their New Hampshire cabin. 

Rebecca: The end of in-person school felt like the perfect moment for this grand experiment. 

Madeline: So I kind of liked it because it meant that you could like, do things scheduled with your body instead of what the clock said. Like you could have lunch whenever you want and breakfast whenever you want. And go to bed whenever you want. 

Madeline loved setting her own bedtime. But not being able to check the clock if she woke up at night scared

Madeline: I kept waking up in the night and like not being able to fall asleep, which made it a little bit scary, because at the mountain house where we tried that, it is like extremely dark in the bedroom. Alexis McCrossen: We in the 21st century, and I think most of the 20th century as well, really distilled time to a kind of essence that it really wasn’t right. Of course, the clock plays an outsized role in our time consciousness. Now, why? Why did clock time take up such a deep hold? Alexis McCrossen: We still follow natural time. I was just trying to coordinate with a friend about an outdoor drink, and it wasn’t about clock time. It was about like, well, what time is it going to be dark? We have tools that allow us to transcend natural time. I have electric lights in my house. So we still live by natural time so it’s not a switch from one to the other.  Alexis McCrossen: The thing is, everybody loves to say like, “Oh, and then these trains crashed because of a lack of coordination.” But it’s not really clear if that’s actually what happened.  It is very difficult, I think, for people to imagine how slow paced and just differently things unfolded in the 19th century. And so it’s very hard for us to imagine that trains wouldn’t be crashing into each other all the time if everybody was following a different standard of time. But they weren’t really running very often.  Eoin: It seems as though, compared to people living today, people living in the past spent a lot more time waiting around for other people to show up.  Alexis McCrossen: Yeah, they did. And they were patient about it and completely chill.  Dawna Ballard: And there were a lot of structures around getting people to unlearn this idea that time was fluid and that life was made of events. It was all about getting us to shift our understanding of time from the event to the clock. Dawna Ballard: I study time and work, and how our communication both shapes and is shaped by that experience.Dawna Ballard: When you come in the doors of the factory. You are a worker and you’re just focused on how efficiently you can do your job.  Dawna Ballard: When I was much younger, there was a Domino’s guarantee that you get your pizza in 30 minutes or less. And they eventually had to stop that because one thing after another, they’d be delayed. And just to meet that 30-minute guarantee, people were getting harmed, physically harmed.[Dominos ad]Ad: Only Dominos pizza delivers in 30 minutes or less. None of the rest are always this hot, this fresh.Alexis McCrossen: – kind of an oppressive force that drained people of their kind of vitality, that monetized time, and that gave those with power much more power. Dawna Ballard: For cultures to function, we need to agree implicitly to some assumptions and then act as if those assumptions are true and real because it gets people to cooperate. So it’s not that it’s all bad. Alexis McCrossen: Clocks become essential for creating possibilities of sort of sociability that you don’t necessarily need if you’re living in a little town where everybody’s following a kind of similar day to day routine.  Alexis McCrossen: Once we were all following the same standard of time, then individuals could obtain some degree of autonomy. They allow me to organize my life in a way that simply just wouldn’t be possible if I wanted to live as a social being. If I wanted to live as a hermit, I can live without clocks and watches altogether. But if I want to connect with other people, then I need to have some coordinating mechanism. And that’s what timekeepers allow.  Alexis McCrossen: In the 19th century, clocks were still so magical that preachers and others could endow them with properties like “steady” or “reliable.” When I think about our relationship to magical objects today, like the mobile phone, I can’t imagine a minister giving a sermon today about how we ought to model ourselves after the virtues of our mobile phones.  [Music]When you see a broken clock, it’s always interesting to see what time it shows and the wonder, you know, why that time, right? Again, because clocks are magical, even though they’re utilitarian, there’s something magical about them, too.Madeline: I don’t know. I think that sometimes with those things, like they actually happen because you stressed they’re going to happen, which is really annoying because you feel like it should be the other way around.  Rebecca: I agree. I totally agree. Madeline: The reason why I want the clock is so when I wake up in the night, I know what time it is. Eoin: Why do you want to know what time it is in the middle of the night when you wake up?  Madeline: Because sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up, I know what the general time frame is, but since it’s so dark at the mountain house, I don’t really know.Stephanie Hanes: But why in general would you want to know what time it is?  Madeline: Cause I go to bed better if I know that there’s only a few hours till morning.  So if I can’t go to bed I won’t be losing way, way, way too much sleep. Stephanie Hanes: So you mean like if you wake up in the middle of the night then…Madeline: I hope it’s not the middle night? Yeah.  Madeline: It just helps me get like, panicked. Madeline: I would just get mamma. Rebecca: And then that helps you go back to sleep? Madeline: Mmhm. Because I like hugging mama. Alexis McCrossen: – because she would wake up in the middle of the night and sort of obsessively check it.Alexis McCrossen: I was a very hard-charging young adult. Like I really felt that I needed to learn a lot. And I didn’t feel that there was enough time in the day to do everything I needed to do. And it was really, really stressful. Alexis McCrossen: The amount of things that you can cram into a day, it’s unbelievable. And the clock is a tool that helps you pull that off. And yet it can also make you kind of unhappy. Dawna Ballard: Polychronicity is the idea of doing many things at one time. And it’s not new. It’s the way that homes have always been run. The challenge we face is that Western post-industrial culture is known as a monochronic culture.Dawna Ballard: – what you get is people like me, who experience a lot of anxiety around how to be efficient and get things accomplished in a very linear fast pace, while trying to manage the fact that life is unfolding. Dawna Ballard: I think most people have been in the situation where you’re in the middle of something important with someone who matters, with an event that matters. How do we manage that? How do we make decisions about what matters?  Rebecca: We’ve been talking for a long time about time, and you spend a lot of time thinking about time. Why do you think most people don’t spend that much time thinking about it? Dawna Ballard: Because it’s part of this basic underlying level of culture. If you were to think of an iceberg, a tip of an iceberg all the way down through the bottom of the ocean and there at the very bottom is where our fundamental assumptions about time are. If we were to talk about it all the time, people might decide, “I want to do something differently.”Dawna Ballard: Cultures always change. And there are times when we culturally come together and we see we have built our society on some assumptions that just don’t work for us anymore. Let’s think about some other ways to structure our lives. Dawna Ballard: – it was like a super sustainable, tiny little store here in Austin. Dawna Ballard: – I said, you know, there might be something wrong with these eggs because the yolks are almost orange. And I called them and they’re like, No, that’s the way eggs actually look.Dawna Ballard: And they said, “Well, the chickens are molting, so there’s no eggs until they’re done. When those chickens are done molting, you’ll get eggs again. And I don’t know when.” And there was no time they could give me. Dawna Ballard: The thing about the early days of the pandemic is that even though we weren’t aware, we probably couldn’t articulate this, but we all got to see true time in action. I say time isn’t a clock. Time is an agreement – which is, you know, socially constructed. We decide what time is. And we got to see how we decide what time is and what matters when we canceled really important events. We canceled things that prior to a global pandemic would be heresy to cancel. I mean, there were weddings canceled. Big conferences, South by Southwest here in Austin was canceled. And people started to understand that we are actually the ones that create time. There wasn’t this mandate that came down from the heavens that said, Here’s time. We were the ones creating it and we can make smart decisions that protect things that we value. And I just hope that that continues. Alexis McCrossen: – and it’s going to begin at 8. We don’t have a lot of room to maneuver, so we’ve got to eat. We’ve got to get out of the house. We’ve got to plan for traffic. Right. There’s not a lot of room for variance. But if we’re just going to, in the age of COVID, tune in to a prerecorded concert whenever we feel like it, then we’ve got a lot more room to wiggle, right? Dawna Ballard: People were being thoughtful about the fact that we don’t control the events around us. In a normal time, individual people have major catastrophes as well, that reshape their life in the way that we were all collectively having our lives reshaped by this event. And so my hope is that long after the pandemic, people understand that in a way that I feel like culturally we haven’t. We’ve not respected the event. Alexis McCrossen: And therefore I know when’s a good time to give her a call. I mean, who would jettison clock time and thereby miss every opportunity to have a conversation with their mother?  The clock opens up a world of possibilities, whether it’s for something mundane or something once in a lifetime. It’s a coordinating mechanism, right? Once it became evident that that’s what you could do with a clock. Who wouldn’t want to?  Eoin: So Madeleine, how do you like your new house?  Madeline: I really like it, yeah. But I think there are too many boxes. Madeline: Me and Lydia unpacked our clock and my momma wouldn’t take it away, which is good because I like having it.  Stephanie Hanes: ”I have also noticed that we are relearning life as a family. Days feel longer. The unimportant and inconsequential have retreated silently into the sidelines of our existence. Wants are reprioritized.My old nemesis, time, quietly urges me to do those things it once commanded me not to do – of course I have time to call my parents and grandparents, to read that extra story. Life does go on without school, without travel, without that tightly gripped illusion of control over the future.I took the clock out of our room, as well. I do not miss it.”Madeline: At the mountain house I don’t know when I was waking up. One day I was up at like, six – it was like, when I got upstairs I was like, Oh, it’s like six thirty. And then one time I was like, What? It’s already eight.  Rebecca: Do you like waking up early?  Madeline: I like waking up early once in a while, but I probably wouldn’t do it all the time because, I mean, I like staying up late. I’m never tired. I’m just worn out.  Rebecca: So my last question is, can you tell me what the word “time” means to you? Like, when you think of the word time? What do you think?  Madeline: Well, how I describe it is what point in the day or night it is, or what point in history it is. Like what point of something. Also, another thing I think about is the plant thyme.Rebecca: Oh, the Earth?  Stephanie Hanes: Like rosemary. Rebecca: Oh, the herb – the plant thyme!