Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps

by Peter Galison

  Scratching out his report in November 1878, Waldo left a blank where Hartford would be, he knew that city stood on the regional border between two time dominions carved by train tracks. “It is to the Rail Road that we must look for the most certain support of our scheme for a general distribution of the observatory time signals. . . . it is the rule that the Rail Road regulates the time of towns along its line.” Train time followed the big city centers, and the New York to Hartford line put the latter squarely in New York’s time radius. But the domain from New London and Providence up to Springfield fell in Cambridge’s time zone. “For some years to come therefore I think Hartford will be the point at which we must cease to give Boston time.” Disputed lands might lie at the margins, but the regional conquest of simultaneity was never in question: “local time throughout New England should be discouraged.”36

  Cambridge lost Hartford. Even Teske’s desperate recruitment of the president of Trinity College could not move the city council. Eventually the Hartford Fire Department threw up its hands and bought a marine chronometer to ring its noon alarm. Dejected, Teske scribbled to the observatory that “of course” this was “considered good enough by those who are ignorant of the minuteness of your Time Signal.” Having failed to move his city, Teske offered to buy Harvard time for his store (one assumes he sold timepieces); he was determined to have an “absolutely correct Time Signal.” Two years later, Connecticut officially set its time to the meridian of the city of New York using electrical signals from Yale Observatory. From the college, time would siphon through the New Haven junction up the railroad tracks of various railroad companies. These train lines were in turn obliged by the law to shoot electric time down all their roads, to mount coordinated clocks at their stations, and to forward time to all intersecting railroads.

  Railroad magnates were not amused. They had their own times and resented any state intrusion. The general manager of New York & New England Railroad Co. grumbled, “The standard time of this road is Boston time . . . but under a ridiculous law in the state of Connecticut we are obliged to use N.Y. time whenever we cross the state line. . . . It is a nuisance and great inconvenience and no use to anybody as I can see.”37

  Throughout: sudden changes of scale. One day the Harvard Observatory would solve a navigator’s problem. Another day, its staff worried about the frozen time ball they released down a high mast by remote control. On yet another, they drafted plans to wire hundreds of cities across the whole of New England. All around the United States, such regions of time coordination grew, as did friction at their boundaries. A jeweler’s store here, a train line there; occasionally a meridian section, a region, or a state. By the end of 1877, Dearborn Observatory (south of downtown Chicago) controlled the clocks of half a dozen jewelers, four main railway companies passing through Chicago, and the Chicago Board of Trade. If Harvard’s Waldo was fanatically striving to shave hundredth-of-a-second errors off his regulator, Dearborn cheerfully indicated that “no great pains are taken to keep very accurate time. The standard signal clock is generally kept within half a second of the exact time. . . . As long as the time furnished is within a second or so of being exact we are satisfied, and we consider that close enough for all practical purposes.”

  Dearborn was right. Train operators and passengers surely did not need clocks more accurate than human reaction time. But differences in time culture reflected more than that. First, Harvard Observatory’s time service had its origins in longitude determination. There a wide consensus existed, not just in the United States, that map making ought to be as accurate as possible. Surveyors wanted accuracy to tenths if not hundredths or even thousandths of a second. Second, the cultivated precision mania of the Harvard Observatory had come to resonate not only among astronomers but also among high-end watchmakers and their gentlemanly New England customers. The culture of precision ticked sooner and louder in Boston than in Chicago.38

  But the greatest contrast lay not among the American observatories but between the United States (or Britain) and France. It is simply unimaginable to picture an American or British astronomer in 1879 refusing to pull a time-bearing telegraph wire through the door of a railroad station, as unimaginable, certainly, as it is to picture an American astronomer defending the unification of time because it would complete the unfinished business of the Age of Reason.

  Measuring Society

  In the fluctuations of scale that marked every stage of the time campaign, one powerful surge toward the global came in the 1870s through the American Metrological Society, founded by Frederick A. P. Barnard, president of Columbia University. Calling on an illustrious assortment of scientists, he urged an internationalism that grounded its cosmopolitanism on commercial exchange: “The diversity of the conventional methods employed by different peoples for determining the quantities and values of material things have been in all times a source of infinite embarrassment to the operations of commerce, and a serious obstacle in the way of intelligent inter-communication between nations.” Metrological reform on the Continent struck Barnard as a sign of hope, one that had yet to cross the shores of the English-speaking lands. Remedying that failure was the goal of the society. On Tuesday, 30 December 1873, the group approved a constitution that set out to “bring [weights, measures, and moneys] into relations of simple commensurability with each other.” Metrologists would attack the zero of longitude, the units of force, pressure, and temperature, as well as the quantification of electricity, bringing their results to the attention of Congress, the states, boards of educations, and universities. It was, in short, a lobby for focusing French rationalism through a commercial lens and printing it on American civil society, from the schoolroom to the railroad yard.39

  Cleveland Abbe, meteorologist and astronomer with the United States Signal Service, found his way to the cause through frustration with patchwork time. In 1874, when Abbe had enlisted amateur observers to study aurora, his troops couldn’t agree on a common time base, confounding Abbe when he tried to combine the various field sightings. Appealing to the metrological society for help, with bureaucratic justice he was promptly made chair of the committee on coordinated time. With Barnard and the Canadian booster Sandford Fleming, Abbe became one of the most outspoken lobbyists for time unification, producing material used before Congress in 1882 and at international congresses in Venice (1881) and Rome (1883).40

  Abbe’s metrological society time team argued in 1879 that truly local times, in an astronomical sense, had long vanished in favor of a mishmash of railroad times. Consequently, the society urged “public institutions, jewelers, town and city officials . . . to regulate the public clocks, bells, and other time signals, by the standard adopted by the principal railroads in or near their respective localities.” One suggestion was to strip the seventy-five various meridians down to three zones, corresponding to four, five, and six hours west of Greenwich. Such a partial unification, they judged, would be good. But one single time standard for the nation would be far better. Set six hours west of Greenwich, this fully national hour would be dubbed “Railroad and Telegraph Time” for “these corporations exert such an influence on our every day life that we are persuaded that if they once take that step towards unification about which they have been talking for many years, then every one in the whole community will follow.”41 Precisely at the moment when Le Verrier was urging French railroads to adopt astronomers’ time “by example,” Americans like Barnard and Waldo wanted civil time modeled on train time.

  Stridently modern, the metrological society resolved to lobby both state and national governments for changes that would extend deep into the fabric of ordinary life. Observatories, allied with railroads and telegraph systems, could deliver time anywhere on the continent. The metrologists insisted that railroad and telegraph time be displayed by a coordinated clock in every public building, every national and state capital, every hospital, prison, custom house, mint, life-saving station, light house, navy yard, arsenal, post office, and postal ca
r. “On and after July 4th, 1880,” they wanted one standard legal time for all purposes throughout the United States.42 To win this battle, the metrological society knew it would have to recruit railroad and telegraph officials as well as astronomical allies, including Waldo and his counterparts at other observatories. As important a recruiting target as any was the thirty-three-year-old secretary of the General Time Convention of Railroad Officials and editor of Travelers’ Official Railway Guide for the United States and Canada, William F. Allen.

  Allen was the time shuffler of all time shufflers, the bureaucrat behind the endless lists of trains and schedules. It was Allen who scheduled the local schedulers; Allen, the railroad man who, more than any other, stood responsible for organizing the myriad iron roads into a guide that allowed the traveler to make connections between lines. And he, at least in June 1879, equivocated before he came to back a plan for unification.43 On the one side, he was being pressed by the scientists’ continental scale of action: they wanted the whole country under the rule of a single time convention. On the other, he and the railroads had to accommodate ordinary people who were used to operating on local time. So he compromised, settling for the status quo that nailed time along the tracks to the big cities they served. In June 1879, Abbe dismissed Allen’s antique attachment to calling it twelve o’clock when the sun happened to be near the meridian. “The advantages of uniform time far outweigh the first week’s awkwardness of the proposed change. Abolish old times is the watchword.”44

  Time reformers popped up everywhere. One outsider, a teacher named Charles Dowd, unsuccessfully petitioned Allen to adopt his zone system.45 If Dowd was an outsider to railroading, looking in, Sandford Fleming was the consummate insider, a railroader and promoter, looking out. The Canadian engineer took to massive projects with an eye scaled to empire. Having cut railway lines through the maritime provinces, put forward plans for the Pacific railway, co-designed Toronto’s Palace of Industry, set the beaver on Canada’s first stamp, and later lobbied for the transpacific cable, Fleming proposed a system that would cover the world. He had no time for town council pragmatism, but instead entered with a progressivist, imperial swagger, and a tincture of injured colonial pride. In 1876, he began writing articles hailing the new train and telegraph technologies, while deriding as antique the time systems they shattered: “We still cling . . . to the system of Chronometry inherited from a remote antiquity, notwithstanding difficulties and inconveniences which are constantly met in every part of the world.” Fleming imagined today’s traveler heading by ship from London to India. Hardly had this modern expedition left the shores of England, and the voyager’s time was wrong. Paris time displaced Greenwich time, only to fall to the times of Rome, Brindisi, Alexandria and then to new times assigned daily until the ship puts into port in India. Maddeningly (in Fleming’s view), Bombay time split between local and railway, with the railway time pinned to Madras. Such regressive confusion, Fleming argued, had to be simplified.46

  Fleming wanted a single, universal time convention for the earth as a whole, with each of the twenty-four zones labeled by assigning to the 0-degree longitude line the name prime meridian; the letter A would stand for the 15-degree line, B the 30-degree line, and so on through X (345-degree line). “Universal,” “cosmopolitan,” or “terrestrial” time was then determined by an imaginary clock fixed in the center of the earth, with its hour hand pointed permanently at the sun. When the earth rotated so that meridian line C crossed the hour hand’s line of sight to the sun, it would be C o’clock everywhere. When D crossed that imaginary line, it was D o’clock everywhere. Every clock in the world would display the same time simultaneously. If Big Ben said it was C:30:27 (meaning 30 minutes and 27 seconds past C o’clock), then so would a clock at Times Square or downtown Tokyo, the “electric telegraph affording the means of securing perfect synchronism all over the earth.” Here was a scale of electric time unification that dwarfed even continental America. To accommodate local sensibilities, Fleming hatched watchmaking schemes. One allowed the user to rotate the whole watch face so the wearer’s local noon (say, for example, F or Q, depending on location) stood at the top. Another design provided side-by-side clock faces, one for local, the other for terrestrial time.47

  To Fleming, such time coordination was vital for the larger countries like Canada, the United States, and Brazil; it was helpful for the European nations of France, Germany, and Austria, and it would obviously benefit Russia, with its 180-degree longitudinal expanse. But Fleming’s Canadian vision still had its focal point on London: “It is of still greater importance to the Colonial Empire of Great Britain with its settlements and stations in nearly every meridian around the entire globe, and with vast territories to be occupied by civilized inhabitants, in both hemispheres.” Railroads and telegraph lines drove this unification. Some 400,000 miles of telegraph lines now ran over seabed and land; 95,000 miles of train track sprawled through Europe and Asia. Railway men like Fleming expected that the world would soon boast a million miles of rail alongside even greater lengths of wire.

  Lines of telegraph and steam communications are girdling the earth, and all countries are being drawn into one neighbourhood—but when men of all races, in all lands are thus brought face to face, what will they find? They will find a great many nations measuring the day by two sets of subdivisions, as if they had recently emerged from barbarism and had not yet learned to count higher than twelve. They will find the hands of the various clocks in use pointing in all conceivable directions.

  Figure 3.7 Fleming’s Cosmopolitan Time. Having begun as an engineer carving railroad routes across Canada, Sandford Fleming fashioned himself as a great defender of a system of electrically based time that would link the whole world to a single “cosmopolitan” hour. In this 1879 diagram, he showed the world itself as a giant clock for which twenty-four letters would replace the traditional reckoning by 1, 2, or 3 o’clock. “C o’clock,” he hoped, would become the universal time when an imaginary line from the center of the earth to the sun passed through the longitude line conventionally labeled “C.” SOURCE: FLEMING, “TIME RECKONING” (1879), P. 27.

  This chaotic condition, Fleming insisted, had to end.48

  Fleming’s first article “Terrestrial Time” failed to reach the powerful audience he imagined. In 1879 he struck again, recycling his first attempt but now in even broader terms, pushing more explicitly than before the need for a universal prime meridian (at Greenwich). The dustbin of history was full of failed contenders for this line, he noted. Cape Verde (about 5 degrees west of Senegal) had been one such putative zero meridian. Gerard Mercator had fixed on the Island del Corvo in the Azores because the magnetic needle there pointed due north. The Spanish had chosen Cadiz, the Russians Pulkovo (outside St. Petersburg), the Italians Naples, the British Cape Lizard (Cornwall), while Brazilians referred their world back to Rio. If one put the prime meridian at the greatest human construction, then it should cross the Great Pyramid—or so claimed the mystical Scottish Royal Astronomer Piazzi Smyth.

  But when Fleming had finished with his ecumenical homage to prime meridia of years past, he returned to Greenwich, from which nearly three-quarters of the world’s shipping set its course. Happily, he reported, the British antimeridian (the line 180 degrees removed from Greenwich) ran through the Bering Strait, crossing a tiny bit of Kamchatka but otherwise spanning water from pole to pole. Setting the prime meridian in the Bering Strait would leave the world’s (Greenwich-based) longitude lines untouched and would necessitate only a minor adjustment in the labeling of those lines. Excoriating the French for their nationalistic preference for Paris, Fleming laid the “universal” line through the observatory central to the British empire. Shipping and imperial power trumped history, mysticism, celestial mechanics, and other nations’ nationalism.49 Fleming’s proposal fell like music on the ears of American time reformers. Abbe informed him in March 1880 that he was working to enlist telegraph and railroad companies; Barnard proudly displ
ayed Fleming’s cosmopolitan-time watches.50

  Not everyone was sanguine about this new universalism. Barnard alerted Fleming that Piazzi Smyth was advancing contrary ideas. In 1864, Smyth had decided that the Great Pyramid embodied the wisdom of sacred Hebrew metrology, ancient knowledge that held contemporary relevance: “seeing how our nation is agitated just now by questions of a change in its hereditary Metrology, and is urged by a powerful political party to take a radically subversive, instead of a correcting, improving, and reforming, step in that direction.” Where French (and some British) metric reformers saw progress, rationality, and universalism, Smyth saw gestures “fatal to national interests and connections.” Where British units struck metric advocates as irrational, Smyth loved the inch and cubit as the last links via the Pyramids to ancient divine light.51

  Barnard blasted back. Given the balance of political and cultural force, the North American reformers judged themselves able, more or less, to ignore Smyth’s opposition. But British Astronomer Royal George Airy could not be so breezily toppled. So when Airy weighed in against Barnard in July 1881, it must have stung (Barnard immediately forwarded a copy of the letter to Fleming). Airy addressed Barnard politely but would not deign to mention Fleming by name. “It seems to me,” Airy cautioned Barnard, “that you must begin with considering, on grounds of convenience and inconvenience, what the mass of people want; and must think of means of supplying that want.” Whatever “the Canadian writer” might think of the traveler’s travails, the issue of resetting one’s watch on long-line railroads was not a problem, claimed Airy. Let the San Francisco–bound train from New York set its clocks by New York time; on the return trip passengers and railroad men could simply abide by San Francisco time. No, the practical problem was not on long American trips, but rather in the “limitohoptious” districts straddling lines of time change. “As to the Cosmopolitan Time what does a man living in Ireland or Turkey care about Cosmopolitan Time: It is wanted by sailors, whose profession carries them through great ranges of longitude. . . . And there its utility ends.” Incredibly to Barnard and Fleming, Airy judged Greenwich itself a poor choice for a time center. Too far to the east to be fairly located within England, the observatory’s sole claim to legitimacy came in being authoritative. For Airy, time should be unified only where unification made sense, as in the island of England. But trying to establish a universal time was a futile battle for the inconvenient goal of “hard and fast” time lines. “I do not imagine that it will ever be received.”52