Writing to Fleming, Barnard tried to soften the blow by referring to Airy’s excessively “opinionated” views and occasional past blunders, including his very public and wrongheaded intervention in the contentious dispute between French and British claims to the discovery of Neptune. Barnard reported to Fleming that he had lobbied Colonel Clarke of the Ordnance Survey in Britain with rather more success; Clarke would support the cause of time unification. But it was clearly a delicate moment. All Barnard’s political skills were tested as he tried to get negotiators of the international Law of Nations to endorse time reform. Barnard lost the chairmanship of the time committee to the vastly more famous William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), who would, Barnard confided, need to be “educated.” Worse, no one had bothered to notify Thomson that he was on the Law of Nations time committee, much less its chair. But while Barnard was trying to inject enthusiasm into Thomson, he had to dampen Fleming’s boosterism, pleading with his northern ally in letter after letter to rein in his scatter-shot polemics: “I esteem it bad policy to evince uncertainty on the eve of battle, or to change point in face of the enemy.” Time languished in committee.53
The apostles of unified time faced difficulty back in North America, too. While Barnard and Fleming stumped for a unified international time with Greenwich as its center, the United States Naval Observatory aimed for one fixed to the nation, not the world. Naval astronomers scoffed at the idea of ordinary people gaining anything whatsoever from a worldwide time, and opposed the locality of time zones. On the contrary: they wanted a European-style scientific time, grounded in a national observatory (theirs), uniform for the entire country. Rear Admiral John Rodgers, superintendent of the observatory, girded for battle in June 1881, looking skyward for support: “The Sun is the national clock used by many, and its position regulates the hour of rising, eating, working, and of going to rest. No other clock can supersede it, as it is the one ordained by Nature to regulate man’s life.” True, he conceded, railroads needed their own time, and the federal government could mandate the printing of Washington time in the schedules. But “[t]he people who do not care for scientific time are a thousand for one of those who do, and besides, I see no overpowering reason why we, with fifty millions of people should take the scientific time of a nation [England] with only thirty millions. If numbers and growth prevail, they should accept ours. I think that the feeling of nationality is too strong with the masses for philosophers to talk it away.” Scientists, Rodgers concluded, “sometimes overestimate their functions.”54
In the increasingly time-wired world of the early 1880s, time reformers campaigned for time unification on conflicting scales. Barnard, Fleming, and their allies pushed for a globe-covering “Terrestrial” time; the great national observatories of France, Britain, and the United States each advocated its own national time. Railroads and cities were the wild cards, much depended on the conventions they chose. Would cities conform to train time as they did in Britain and much of America? And if so, by what geography of simultaneity? Or would trains retain their own time, as in France? Convenience and convention were the watchwords, but whose master clock would set which lesser clocks? In late 1882, Allen endorsed a compromise proposal: set one-hour time zones for the whole North American railroad system. The metrological society welcomed Allen’s efforts, enthusiastically reporting that Congress resolved to instruct the president to call for an international convention to which the U.S. would send three delegates. New York was contemplating switching its time ball to Greenwich time, the U.S. Post Office adopted a common time, and Barnard was lobbying President Chester A. Arthur while stumping for time reform with Secretary of State Frederick T. Frelinghuysen. Both the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science backed the effort.55 On the railroad tracks, the time unification scheme rolled even more swiftly. Some southerners briefly rebelled with a system tailored to their needs; but their move was crushed.56 When Allen and the railroad presidents, managers, passenger agents, and superintendents met for their General Time Convention on 11 April 1883 in St. Louis, Missouri, railroad sentiment seemed to have turned toward the change to an hour system divided along the 75th, 90th, and 105th meridian lines.
Allen weighed in hard: “. . . the ‘Hard Scrabble’ system now in use, with its fifty different standards intersecting and interlacing each other, is an abomination and a nuisance which cannot be too soon remedied.” To displace such chaos Allen presented his pièce de résistance: a map with three longitudinal time zones, each tinted in its own color, and its enemy, a multicolored quiltwork of the current division of time. Enthusiasts could buy either map, though the second one (depicting current chaos) couldn’t be mass printed (too complicated) and cost twice as much. “A single glance at this map is sufficient, I think, to convince every one of the absurdity of the present status of this matter.” As Allen made clear, the time zone system could have its zero line anywhere. True, the temptation would be great to pin the zero of longitude in Washington, D.C. But such parochialism was, he contended, unacceptable:
Figure 3.8 Trains, Times, and Zones. Time unification—an issue for reformers, astronomers, and standardizers—gained power when railway schedulers took up the cause of zoned time to avoid the proliferation of local times. This railway map plots many of the different local times before the zone reform of November 1883, as well as the dividing lines that the railways adopted after that date. SOURCE: CARLTON J. CORLISS, THE DAY OF TWO NOONS (1952), P. 7.
We are, all of us, more or less imbued with a feeling of local pride, and if the meridian time of the “Hub of the Universe” is the standard by which the trains on our particular road are run, we feel like holding to it. But, my friends, what right have you to claim that particular meridian as belonging to your city. The villages of Gum Tree and of Hard Scrabble are on the same meridian and have as much right to give it a name as your beautiful city has. . . . For all ordinary business transactions one standard is as good as another, so long as all agree to use it.57
Time was a convention, an agreement like any other that would, depending on the accord, unify cities, lines, zones, countries, or the world. Inscribing that arbitrariness into the collective language was as great a transformation as the acquisition of a regularized time awareness.
Both astronomers and railroaders viewed the new technologies of transport and communication as disciplining time more effectively than any school. As Allen put it, “Railroad trains are the great educators and monitors of the people in teaching and maintaining exact time.” Train lines had altered the experience of time across Europe and North America; more than that, for an ever-growing portion of the population, railroad schedules had come to define time, to instantiate synchronicity. Indeed, without the quintessentially modern trains and telegraphs, the temporal structure of the world would, for most people, drift from its moorings. “I venture to assert,” Allen added, “that if this city were cut off from railroad and telegraph communication for an entire month, and on the first night all clocks and watches were simultaneously and surreptitiously set half an hour faster or slower, not one person out of a thousand would . . . discover for himself that any change had been made.”58
Winding up the convention, Allen slipped into a revealing parable that was at once tongue-in-cheek and reflective of the railroaders’ position, since in setting conventions of time they were determining the electric enforcement of simultaneity for the country as a whole:
It is on record that a small religious body once adopted two resolutions as a declaration of its faith. The first was,
Resolved, That the saints should govern the earth. Second,
Resolved, That we are the saints.59
Resolved or not, some among the railroaders saw the time masters as anything but saints. This opposition was not, as Allen sometimes suggested, based on a reactionary attachment to the removal of God’s own noonday sun. Protesters uniformly accepted the principle of a railroad-and-telegraph-determined simultan
eity. There were, after all, already effective time zones carved out by railroads from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A railroad guide in September 1883, for example, showed some forty-seven lines running on New York time while thirty-six took time from Chicago’s clocks, while Philadelphia’s clocks governed another thirty-three.60 Every train line accepted the conventionalism of time. This fundamental feature of late-nineteenth-century time was so deeply hammered into rails and wires that it was as present to time-zone protesters as it was to boosters. What then did the dissenters dispute? One newspaper article, defending a single national time, targeted the observatories, where astronomers, in charge of far-flung outposts, had grown fat feeding time to regions; local simultaneity had become “the meat upon which these star-gazers feed.” Another anti-standard time complaint came from an almanac publisher: sunrise and sunset times would be thrown into a cocked hat by time unification.61 Most protesters simply disputed the dividing lines of conventional simultaneity, their antizonism grounded in the convenience of local train schedules, or regional, national, or universal time. Very few invoked “God’s true time.”62
With just a week before the General Time Convention was to begin on 11 October 1883, Allen told a dissenting Massachusetts train line that he now had some seventy thousand miles of road lined up behind time reform. As mileage mounted, he treated the opposition with less solicitude.63 Cities too fell into place. In Boston, the trains agreed to switch to standard time if the Harvard Observatory and its dependent institutions would do so as well. When the time convention delegates at Chicago’s Grand Hotel received a crucial telegraphic concession from the Bostonians, it was clear that the reform would pass: “The city, the railroads, and the observatory only await affirmative vote of Convention before fixing date for changing all public time in Boston.” Applause echoed through the room.64 Saluting the inevitable, the Naval Observatory too agreed to the zone system, setting aside its national-scientific aspirations.65
When the vote came, railway officials canvassed not by the number of delegates for or against, or even by the number of companies saying yay or nay. Instead voting was by mile of track (appropriately enough). For the reform: 27,781 miles of track within the convention plus 51,260 miles of nonmember rails, yielding 79,041 iron miles in favor of Greenwich-based time zones. A mere 1,714 track miles lay opposed. “Resolved, that we hereby pledge ourselves to run the trains upon our respective roads by the standards agreed upon and to adopt the same when the next schedule goes into effect,” 18 November 1883.66 Allen wanted a system of branched electrically coordinated clocks that would join all the time balls and train clocks and urban clocks together, pinning the whole to Greenwich.67
As the seventy-nine thousand miles of railroads hoped, New York agreed to zone simultaneity on 19 October 1883, when Mayor Franklin Edson signed his approval. Edson forwarded the recommendation to the city’s aldermen wrapped in a sheaf of railway documents and institutional endorsements. By year’s end, conventionality talk about time was as common in New York as Paris; even an American big-city politician could proclaim: “What is called local time is only a mean which differs from astronomical time, but which suits the convenience of the people in any locality because all agree to use it.” Since the majority of the community benefits and difference is slight, the mayor reasoned, why not conform to the new standard?68 “Conventional and arbitrary,” chimed the city fathers, time “should be accommodated to that which is most agreeable to the interests of the people whom it is designed to direct.” With those words came the resolution that at noon on 18 November 1883, not only the railways but also New York City time would be that of the seventy-fifth meridian, running several minutes west of City Hall.69
Time reformation had passed from a myriad of competing simultaneities to a tightly coordinated fact, plucked from telescopes, confirmed by humming iron rails, then wired into metropolitan clocks. Barnard wrote Fleming on 22 October 1883, reporting that the railroads had finally successfully attacked time: “This settles the question forever, for this hemisphere. In Europe, we cannot hope for a similar result in our time. Paris will probably never consent to use Greenwich time, but we need not concern ourselves about that.” Perhaps, Barnard mused, the North American triumph of zone simultaneity “[m]ight stir up dilatory governments to take action in regard to the proposed Prime Meridian Conference at Washington.”70
Time into Space
In the Paris of mid-1884, however, observatory time was not, for a single minute, mainly about trains and city clocks. The Paris Observatory had never been structured as a commercial enterprise. Time-distributing astronomy, at least among the Polytechnicians and their allies, did not have the slightest role (as for many of their British counterparts) in sanctifying empire with natural theology. Conversely, even among Anglo-American metric boosters, the charms of the meter tended to be charms of facilitated, international commerce. For French savants including Poincaré, his teachers, and colleagues, exchange advantages might well be apparent. But there was far more to decimalization, unification, and rationalization than that. These were longstanding Enlightenment ideals, ideals that joined French aspirations to restore national dignity after the “disaster” of 1870 to the establishment of the secular, progressive rationality that they held to be the hallmark modernism of the Third Republic itself.
For Poincaré, progressive and technical goals were united in the Bureau of Longitude, one of the great centers of enlightened science since the Revolution. By 1884, the Bureau’s principal activity was using observatory-based electrical time to map the world electrically. Indeed, for the whole period from the mid-1860s to the 1890s, France, Britain, and the United States raced to establish simultaneity over a sprawling network of undersea telegraph cables to fix longitudes and redraw the global map. This race for symbolic map-possession contributed to the explosive atmosphere surrounding the prime meridian showdown slated for October 1884 in Washington, D.C. But the stakes involved in setting the electric worldmap were higher still. In 1898, when Poincaré argued in “The Measure of Time” that simultaneity was a convention, he had been for over five years a “member” (one of the handful of guiding figures) at the Bureau, serving in that capacity from 4 January 1893 until his death in 1912. In September 1899, about a year and a half after he published “The Measure of Time,” Poincaré was elected president of that institution, a post he rose to again in both 1909 and 1910. No figurehead, Poincaré issued reports, led commissions, and oversaw longitude operations during some of his most productive years.
The Bureau of Longitude? One might imagine such a calculational bureaucracy to be of little interest when set against the higher reaches of Poincaré’s mathematical physics or his inquiries into non-Euclidean geometries, the stability of the Solar System, or daring philosophical accounts that put conventions in place of absolute truth. But the Bureau’s task is central to our story. Rightly understood, the vast theory machine it ran will alter our understanding of a turning point in Poincaré’s reconceptualization of time.
On 7 April 1884, the astronomer Hervé Faye stood before the Academy of Sciences in Paris to read a report by Lieutenant Octave de Bernardières that raised a crucial issue. De Bernardières was one of the first of a new type of naval officer trained not only for his ocean-going career but also brought up, so to speak, by the astronomers at Montsouris. He so excelled in his astronomy that he was soon co-authoring a massive 336-page report on the very unoceanic longitudinal difference between Berlin and Paris. But to the Academy of Sciences, de Bernardières reported that the precision of longitude determination had increased dramatically over the previous years, sometimes thanks to the transport of accurate clocks and sometimes by astronomical means. In 1867 these older techniques fell by the way as the first cable spanned the Atlantic Ocean, closing the longitudinal gap between England (Greenwich Observatory) and the United States (Naval Observatory, Washington). Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the new technology undergirded all long-distance longitude work as telegraphs co
upled to submarine cables crisscrossed all the world’s oceans.71
In Britain, especially, factories churned out prodigious quantities of cable. First, a thick copper conductor was insulated by commercial “gutta”—a newly developed mixture of gum, gutta-percha, resin, and water. Then the manufacturers wound jute yarn to provide a cushion between the gutta-coated cable and a ring of thick iron wires to protect the copper core from breaking. More jute bound these iron wires together; then more wires with more yarn (at least near the dangerous rocky shore), and a final waterproof outer sheathing of the Malayan rubberlike gutta-percha. Steam-powered ships carried the mile-long sections out to sea, where onboard cable masters tied them together to span thousands of miles and sometimes hauled them out again when they (all too often) were split by sea life, icebergs, volcanoes, anchors, or sharp rocks.72
As de Bernardières knew well, the French had long been frustrated by the discrepancies in map making that resulted from long ocean voyages (which rendered chronometers unreliable). The French Bureau of Longitudes was directed in 1866 to fix clear secondary locations around the globe. It duly launched six parties to the various corners of the world. Their assignment was to use the position of the moon against the background of the stars to determine the local longitudes of sites in North and South America, Africa, China, Japan, along with others in the Pacific and Indian ocean islands. Such mapping demanded a monumental effort, and the French government withheld neither expense nor effort. In principle, the idea was simple: if astronomers in two parts of the world could both pinpoint the time at which the position of the moon reached its highest point on the celestial sphere, then those observations would be simultaneous. The navigator would look up on a chart what time that was back home and observe what time it was locally. The difference gave the longitudinal difference between the two points. A difference of six hours? –90 degrees of longitude.
Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps Page 12