The culture of time and space

Review of Stephen Kern, The culture of time and space 1880-1918, and David Landes Revolution in time: clocks and the making of the modern world

Over the past two years, Design has favourably reviewed a number of new books by American historians. Now it is revealed that the themes common to all of them were time, space and technology. Judith Merkle (Management and ideology) surveyed the father of time-and-motion study, Frederick Taylor. Ruth Schwartz Cowan (More work for Mother) looked at the hours spent slaving by the housewife in the home. J David Bolter (Turing’s man) wrote chapters on ‘Electronic space’ and ‘time and progress in the computer age’. For designers, Stephen Kern’s book follows in the same tradition. Panoramic, scholarly and well written, it is about the social and perceptual context for design. It is also deeply suggestive about how that context is likely to shape up in the future.

For Kern the years around the turn of this century were ones in which society gained a dramatically new perception of time and space. A number of factors lay behind this. First, a boom in electricity, petrol and transport gave speed a special prominence. Second, inventions such as Edison’s phonograph and incandescent lamp (1877, 1879), supplemented by breakthroughs such as Einstein’s relativity theory, tended to unmask time and space as malleable materials rather than unalterable, linear abstractions. Last, geopolitical and in the end military developments concentrated minds on time and space more precisely – more quantitatively, in fact – than ever before.

Kern shows how the information technology revolution of 1880-1918 heightened the impact of The Present. For the international rich, the wireless telegraph and the telephone gave simultaneity of communication. When, in 1912, the over-hasty Titanic sank after crashing into a North Atlantic iceberg, it was the international rich who had the unprecedented experience of following a foreign disaster almost in real time – courtesy the telegraph.  For the American poor, however, The Present made a different kind of impression. Through tens of thousands of nickelodeons, millions of Americans gained the pleasure of watching goings-on in foreign lands almost as soon as they had happened. And, as if to compound the frenzy, mass cinema focused on the Present with the further aid of montage, live pianists, and projector operators who cranked each reel by hand.

All this and James Joyce’s Ulysses to read too – an epic meditation on the nature of time. Kern fairly piles on the evidence to show how technology and the arts changed the way we apprehend some of the basic categories of physics. Speed? The author explains how German battleships, Siemens trams, Otis escalators and bikes and cars of all descriptions made people grow fond of speed. Meanwhile, he observes, Italy’s Futurists and France’s Marcel Duchamp celebrated speed in painting, just as Scott Joplin and Igor Stravinsky celebrated it in music. Critics of speed, however, yearned for the days of sailing boats, lauding them as majestic and graceful.

Space and form? Here Kern’s approach, though eclectic, is once again convincing. For him the point about space is how much it tightened in the run-up to the First World War. The conquest of the American frontier and of the two Poles was accompanied by the rise of imperialism – in the mining metaphor of Lord Rosebery, the ‘pegging out claims for the future’. As the scramble for Africa showed, every square mile was precious in the struggle for space. In regard to Form, penetration came to be the dominant metaphor. Before 1900, Samuel Smiles had reassured Victorians with the goal of ‘a place for everything, and everything in its place’. After 1900 invasion and dislocation were everywhere, stimulated by developments as varied as radiography, fluoroscopy, the microphone, garden cities, privacy laws, Wassily Kandinsky, the revolving stage and the cabaret.

It all ended, as Kern shows, in July 1914, when five ultimata, each with time limits measured in hours, were exchanged within 10 days. War was, for the first time, declared by telegram, and the wristwatch changed from unmanly bauble to standard military equipment. Generals monopolised the future: Britain’s plan for the first day of the Somme, in which Tommies died at a rate of 10,000 an hour, ran to 31 pages. For men in the isolated, relativistic universe of the trenches and No Man’s Land, however, only camouflage, a technology developed out of Cubism, could provide much hope.

Why is Kern’s historical excavation relevant to designers working in 1985? Well: we may not now have an energy surplus, as Henry Ford enjoyed, but in an era of satellite television, phones in cars and Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars, space and distance are not what they used to be. Equally, designers need to keep track of how time is being manipulated today. Computers, commercial competition and the rise of banking technology have turned the graphic display into a weapon for beating time. Interior designers, too, have learnt to blur the boundaries between the form of shops and that of leisure centres, public environments and offices: we are also in the age of the car as office, or the office as home. As for industrial design, Speed of new product development, of production and of user training are the key issues of the moment.

The culture of time and space does not hint at this. But it confirms that technology has radically changed the human cerebellum in the past, and that it could well do the same again in the future.

David Landes’ industrialisation epic The unbound Prometheus ought to be obligatory for all designers. But he has now turned his hand to the clock as an instrument of national rivalry (Chinese clepsydras lose to European pendulum portables, 1600; Brits lose to Swiss 1800; Swiss lose to Seiko and Citizen, 1978). He looks, too, at the clock as a cipher for man.

The clock, after all, is a paradigmatic product. It is a make-it-anywhere machine for converting energy into information, and displaying that information. It is also, as Lewis Mumford has observed, a means of ‘synchronising the actions of men’.

Landes journeys from simple horologia to weight-driven machines by way of punctual Christian monasteries and some rather poor photographs and diagrams at the back. For him the necessities of urbanisation mothered Europe’s infant clock industry, so that by the fourteenth century textiles exporters from Florence to Flanders summoned their workers by bell. While France’s Francis I had watches built into two daggers (1518), Britain’s Elizabeth I had one put in a ring: it used to give her finger a little scratch by way of an alarm. Clockmaking was dominated by Protestants, encouraged by Calvin, but began to achieve a mass audience only in the American Civil War.

By the 20th century Swiss domination in clocks was unchallenged, however. Bulova imported Swiss movements between the wars, and America lagged in the production of slim wristwatches, the successor to pocket watches. Even today, Patek and Piaget reign supreme at the top of the analog market; while Hong Kong, not Japan, is now the leading exporter of watches in the world. It is a tribute to Landes’ skill that his concluding chapter, which goes into the minutiae of the quartz revolution, is among his best.

‘Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself’, wrote Marx in 1857. The only problem with these time-obsessed books is that they have taken so long to be written.