Timekeepers

by Simon Garfield

  The most prominent vision of freedom in our lives is invariably wrapped up with visions of time standing still: a freedom from the tyranny of the clock. Advertisers have found no more powerful single image of bliss than a deserted sandy coastline. In literature this symbol has been defined by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in terms of the Parisian flâneur wandering the city at glittering dusk, taking a turtle for a walk, going at the turtle’s pace.6

  The cosmologist Carl Sagan said it eloquently in 1994, in the early pages of his book Pale Blue Dot. When, in February 1990, the spacecraft Voyager 1 was about to exit the solar system, it took a photograph of Earth from about 3.7 billion miles away at Sagan’s request (‘Pale Blue Dot’ is also the name of the photograph). Our planet did not, as was to be expected, seem terribly significant in the picture. But its true insignificance in the beautiful firework of light rays was unutterably humbling: a particle so small it was easy to dismiss as a piece of dust on the lens. ‘Look again at that dot,’ Sagan implored.

  That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam . . .

  Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light . . . There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

  Every superstar indeed. And what was Sagan’s message after all this shrinkage of the world and the exposure of our folly? Just to be a little kinder to each other.

  The physicist Richard Feynman had yet another take: we are at the very beginning of time for the human race. If we don’t destroy ourselves, the purpose of the time we have here is to grant time to those who come after us. We leave messages and evidence and progress where we can. We are ‘atoms with curiosity’, and that alone gives us purpose as the tiniest speck of matter in the spinning universe. We can only laugh and delight at the futility of it all.

  Our own brief dash – that hyphen between the dates on our gravestones – is all we have against this cosmic insignificance. Which is why this book has been concerned with practical matters, key moments when some of our most fleeting thoughts on time came into focus for a short while. Here’s another one. In 2011, Randy Newman – best known for his songs for the Toy Story movies but loved also for his sad and witty parables of grown-up American life – performed a small show in front of an invited audience in the London showroom of Steinway and Sons. ‘The song I’m going to play for you today is called “Losing You”,’ Newman began.

  Most of my songs, I don’t know where they come from. Unless it’s an assignment, someone’s paying me to do a movie or something. But in this case my brother was a doctor, an oncologist, dealt with cancer. Early in his career he had a 23-year-old kid who was a football player, who had brain cancer, and he died very quickly. He was a star athlete – gone. And the parents of the kid talked to my brother, and they said, ‘We lost family 40 years ago in the extermination camps in Poland. And we got over that, eventually we got over it. But we don’t have time now to get over this.’ And it’s a big idea, in a way.

  It is a big idea, and one that resonates. We are concerned with the precise minutiae of time, the train times, the ticking watch, but when we step back to consider the wider perspective it can be almost too much for us. We don’t have to be Einstein to know that all time is relative: it may be enough to have lost loved ones too early, or be struggling against the ravages of serious illness. Life is too short, and full of misery, and we spend most of our time figuring out how to survive or extend it, for it’s all we have for sure.

  But there is another message here. We have never met the young football player or his family, and we may not admire Randy Newman or his song, but we all understand the layered complexities of the passage of time. Newman roots the complexity in a story – both in his introduction and the song – because telling stories is the best way of marking the passage of time that we know. Stories are also the best way of making sense of time, and we have been using them to navigate our way long before time was a studied discipline, and certainly before clocks. Allen’s and Freud’s wilful ‘delusions’ are also just stories, studied diversions from the reality of mortality. This is the reason we are attracted not only to the artefacts in the British Museum but also to slow food and Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, and why the Beatles’ Please Please Me and Beethoven’s Ninth still enthral: in all their humanity lies the story of us.

  Throughout this book we’ve seen how people have written the modern story of time in their own way. Railway pioneers threw the world into motion until those who made timetables settled it again. Watchmakers complicated things while time gurus simplified them. Christian Marclay moved the minute hand as Harold Lloyd hung on. Ruth Ewan revolutionised the calendar while Buzz Aldrin wore a watch on the moon. Roger Bannister ran to glory and Nick Ut ran to war.

  Our obsessions with time have taken us to the edge but not over it. The old stories offer a vision of the future, and our pale blue dot keeps spinning towards a fate we can influence more than we think.

  _______________

  1 Sloane was a physician, specialising in dysentery and eyes – one imagines not at the same time – and serving as general physician to Samuel Pepys and three successive monarchs. He also made important advances in the field of smallpox inoculation and the drinking of milk chocolate, something he brought back from his far-reaching travels. He lived to 92, rare in the eighteenth century, and so had ample time to collect. When he died in 1753 he had agreed to sell his collections to the Crown in return for £20,000 to be paid to his family. In London his patch was Chelsea, and he has Sloane Square and other byways of Knightsbridge named after him.

  2 ‘The Statutes and Rules of the Trustees’ , 1757.

  3 As quoted in That Noble Cabinet by Edward J. Miller (London, 1974).

  4 The story is the key, as much in our generation as when the museum opened. People didn’t queue for ever for the Tutankhamun show just to see all the gold; they wanted to be a part of the discovery narrative too. The same with Grayson Perry; here the story was the eccentricity of the artist and the rude unpredictability of his curation.

  5 Deep time is a geologist’s equivalent of the Patek Philippe advert: you never actually live on the earth, you merely look after it for the next species or ice age. The phrase distinguishes our time (the time in Switzerland, the time on our iPads) from a slightly longer time, specifically the age of Earth, some 4.45 billion years. It’s a sobering distinction: think about our insignificance on the planet for too long and you’d never get out of bed.

  6 We first met Walter Benjamin in a footnote in Chapter 2. The vision of the turtle appears in his Arcades Project, written from 1927–40, in which the author observes what he believes will be authentic Paris from the streets. The notion of the flâneur dates as far back as Baudelaire a century before. The link between tortoises and time goes all the way back to Aesop (I’m using turtles and tortoises interchangeably here, American style), but its most pertinent connection may be as a punchline to the anecdote at the start of an obscure book called A Brief History of Time. Here, Stephen Hawking considers the absurdity of cosmology and the consistency of the world. The world, attests ‘a little old lady’ attending a lecture by a famous scientist (‘some say it was Bertrand Russell’), is flat, and supported on the back of a giant tortoise. ‘But what supports the tortoise?’ the scie
ntist asks. And the answer comes back, ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’

  Epilogue:

  Humility Watch

  I am about to buy a new watch. New to me, at any rate: the watch was made in 1957, three years before I was born, and a short while later (according to the engraving on the back of the case) was given to a railwayman in appreciation of 45 years’ service on the London Midland Region. It has 15 jewels, thin blue steel hands and gold numerals. It keeps good time for a wind-up machine manufactured in England almost 60 years ago, but the man selling it to me in a shop overlooking the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge won’t let me leave with it, as he believes its inaccuracy is intolerable. At its best the watch will lose or gain about 15 seconds a day. But at the moment it is losing 72 seconds a day.

  The measurement was gauged on a time machine called the Multifunction Timegrapher, a small box that amplified its movement and produced a digital readout. ‘All of watchmaking is about the distribution of tiny amounts of force and the introduction and control of tiny amounts of friction,’ the salesman says, as if he is describing life itself. ‘On your watch, the balance on one side is probably slightly mushroomed – it’s been hit and things have happened to it that have made it slightly flattened. Whereas on the other side it’s more like it was when it left the factory – nicely domed, with a very small point of contact.’

  After his diagnosis is complete, he says I should come back for the watch in a few days, once he’s recalibrated it. When I return a week later he says, ‘It looks pretty honest. It’s a very confident statement. See how you get on with it.’

  I got on it with it well and wore it with pleasure. When I had my bike accident it tumbled over the handlebars with me and emerged unscathed. It was made by Smiths of Cheltenham, a company with roots in horology from the 1860s. Smiths’ proudest day came in May 1953 with the first ascent of Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary (‘I carried your watch to the summit,’ the company’s adverts proclaimed. ‘It worked perfectly.’) Ever since the ascent, a gold-cased Smiths timepiece was the gift par excellence for career long-service, and in 1957 a retiree named O.C. Walker had been presented with the 15-jewel De Luxe I’m wearing now. He had served his time, and the railways wanted him to be certain about the time he had left.

  My salesman was a 40-year-old Londoner named Crispin Jones. Jones was thin, wiry and gentle in his manner, and prematurely balding; he looked like a cherubic version of Jude Law. Selling vintage watches was only a sideline for him. His main line was selling items that encouraged the purchaser to think of time in a new way.

  Jones trained as a sculptor and then studied computer design, and after a while he began combining the two. A few years ago he made an office desk that answered questions. The questions were things like ‘Will my love be returned?’ ‘What do my friends think of me?’ ‘Will I find my lost item?’ The questions were contained on cards, 30 in all, and to obtain the answers the user had to place them over a metal slot on the desk. ‘It was an attempt to use the computer in a similar way that ancient civilisations used oracles,’ Jones said. ‘The catch was, the metal slot became hotter and hotter as the answer came up.’ A barcode was concealed in the pattern on the card, so when you dropped it onto the slot you triggered an electronic reader that slowly produced an answer on a dot matrix. The answer to ‘Will my love be returned?’ would produce the answer ‘Yes . . . if . . . you . . . stay . . . true . . . to . . . your . . .’ By the time the answer got to ‘true’ the card slot would be getting quite hot, but if you withdrew your hand the system would reset and you wouldn’t see the whole answer. The last – very hot – word was ‘ideals’.

  Jones was interested in the way modern technology was changing our lives: what it gives and what it takes away. In 2002 he did some experimental work with mobile phones, at a time when the etiquette was uncertain. ‘There were no silent carriages and everyone was still talking annoyingly loudly in public.’ Jones built a phone that delivered a variable level of electric shock to a user talking too loudly, and a phone that knocked rather than rang. If the call was for a simple catch-up, the knock could be made soft and unassuming; but if the call was urgent, the knock would be loud and insistent.

  And then he started thinking about watches. ‘The watch is interesting,’ he mused, ‘because we don’t think of it as technology the way we do about phones or computers. And it’s an incredible survivor: most technologies that are 10 years old look incredibly outdated, so that if I use a phone from 10 years ago it’s almost a provocation, and it makes me look massively eccentric. But you’re wearing your wristwatch from the 1950s and it doesn’t seem extraordinary.’ He observes that many of us tend to have the same sort of phones these days, but watches remain one of the few outward signs of our personality. ‘And with watches you can weave in a lot of interesting stories and remap the concepts of how we think about time.’

  At the Royal College of Art, Jones had been influenced by former student Anthony Dunne, whose book Hertzian Tales argued for a more considered critique of electronic products, not least a re-examination of everyday objects on aesthetic grounds. In 2004 Jones wrote a manifesto posing two questions: ‘How could a watch undermine its wearer?’ and ‘What if the watch could express some of the negative aspects of the wearer’s personality?’ But his most provocative question was ‘How can the watch represent time in a different way?’

  With assistance from design colleagues Anton Schubert, Ross Cooper and Graham Pullin, Jones set out to provide practical answers. They made working prototypes of several watches, only one of which bothered to tell the accurate time. They were all a little clunky, a mix of rosewood, steel and an electronic LED display, with rechargeable batteries that lasted five days. The watches were rectangular rather than round, and they looked like a possible prototype of the Apple Watch.

  Jones gave them deliberately pretentious Latin names. First up was The Summissus, subtitled ‘The Humility Watch’. This was ‘an object designed to remind people that death should be prepared for at any time’. The watch had a mirror face and alternated between flashing the time and the message ‘Remember you will die’.

  The Avidus was ‘The Stress Watch’. This reflected the feeling we have of time speeding by when we are stressed, and time slowing down when we are relaxed. The wearer would press the two metal contacts on the face, and a pulse would activate the display. The more stressed the user, the faster the time would run; the more relaxed the user, the slower, and a meditative state would cause the time to run backwards.

  The Prudens was ‘The Discretion Watch’. This is a watch that can be read without looking at it – in a meeting say, or when on a date, so as not to appear bored or rude. The watch was worn as two opposing faces on the front and back of the wrist, and when the wearer rotated their arm in the air, a pulse would be transmitted to the wrist corresponding to the correct hours and minutes.

  Then there was Fallax, ‘The Honest Watch’, which projects the wearer’s integrity. Many watches aim to reflect the owner’s wealth and status, but Fallax has a purer intention: by wearing two finger straps, the watch becomes a lie detector and the word ‘LIES’ flashes up on the face to alert those close to you that you may not be trusted.

  The Adsiduus was ‘The Personality Watch’, flashing up a random series of messages both positive and negative: ‘You are amazing’ or ‘You have no real friends’ or ‘Your future will be worse’.

  And finally there was the Docilus, ‘The Internal Watch’, transmitting a small and unpleasant electric shock at unpredictable intervals, leading to the greater internalisation of time and a decreased dependency on both the watch and strict timekeeping.

  Taken en masse, the watches represented a Proustian daydream that threatened to become a nightmare. Of all the timekeepers I had met, Jones was the wittiest, and the one who thought the longest about the implications of time’s advance. There was no doubt in his mind that time was dominating our lives, but was it doing so in meaningful and constructive ways? And
if not, could it be bent back to do so? In 2005 Jones decided to ready some of his prototypes for production.

  The workshop of Mr Jones Watches is in Camberwell, south-east London, about four miles from his shop by the Thames. It is a reassuringly ramshackle and industrious place, a well-lit single room with a racing bike hanging on a wall alongside a post-war poster encouraging efficiency. Almost all the horizontal surfaces are covered in watch parts, watch tools, watch-part manufacturing machines, watch regulating machines, watch packaging and watches – a strewn decade of experiment and invention. Metal cabinets beneath the desks contain more of the same. The room is part laboratory, part museum, part explosion.

  The first watch Jones made was a new version of The Summissus. He renamed it The Accurate, and placed the word ‘remember’ on the hour hand and ‘you will die’ on the minute hand. The watch still had a reflective face – the wearer confronted by their own mortality – but this time it was round, which made it look less like an art project. Its purpose, as with almost all of Jones’s other designs, was now refocused to be a little less negative and a bit more encouraging: time could be charming as well as perplexing and uncontrollable.

  The next watch Jones designed was The Mantra, a ‘positive/negative suggestion watch’ like The Adsiduus. The watch had a narrow window, and as each half hour passed the disc revealed a message. A positive statement was followed by a negative one: ‘Be the Best’; ‘Always Be Alone’; ‘You’re Blessed’; ‘Stay Dull’. ‘Over time,’ Jones wrote in his catalogue, ‘the Mantra makes the meek more confident and the arrogant more humble.’ The watch was inspired by the theories of French psychoanalyst Émile Coué, whose ‘optimistic autosuggestion’ promoted the healing power of positive thought. (Coué’s prime example was championed by Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em: ‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.’)