Soul of the World (4 page)

M
INUTES

I stood on the bridge at midnight,

As the clocks were striking the hour.

—
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Clocks have been with us for about seven hundred years, since the late thirteenth century. There is some evidence that the Chinese constructed one almost six hundred years before that, but for one reason or another they abandoned the technology, leaving it for the Europeans to reinvent. It seems strange that the Dark Ages, which stretched from the end of the Roman Empire in
A.D.
450 to the beginning of the high Middle Ages in
A.D.
1100, hatched the technology of time measurement, but it did. This was partially because of the rise of monasticism. Clocks, along with Anno Domini (
A.D.
, in the year of our Lord), we owe to Christianity.

Monasteries not only kept the flame of civilization lit by translating Greek and Roman texts, they also provided the kind of stable, scholastic environment that fostered technical innovation. Cloistered monks needed an accurate way to schedule their many daily prayers, and this called for a fail-safe method of timing. At first they used calibrated candles, hourglasses and sundials, but all of these had limitations. It was the mechanics of devotion, for keeping an appointment with the divine, that propelled the evolution of their timekeeping devices. After all, the heavenly realm had its own schedule, one that transcended the vagaries of seasonal changes in the length of day and night. As early as the eleventh century, monasteries had built mechanical devices attached to bells that announced prayer time, and it was these machines, or at least the concept behind them, that provided the basis for the invention of the clock. Clocks, at their very inception, already had one cog in the otherwordly.

It was no accident, then, that the first true mechanical clock was installed at Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire, England, in
A.D.
1283. Twelve years earlier, a key component, something called the “escapement,” had been designed by a technician known to history only as Robert the Englishman. The escapement was a clever invention that used toothed wheels, counterweights and drive-gears to convert the downward force exerted by gravity on a drive weight into a regular mechanical movement. Within a decade the escapement, and the clocks that it powered, had spread across Europe. Large public clock towers were erected in many European cities. At first a great number of them had no clock faces and only sounded bells on the hour. It took a few more decades until the first dials, with a single hand to mark the hours, appeared.

Public clocks must have seemed exceptionally modern at the time. They were the first mechanical technology to surpass Rome’s, and the first sign that the Middle Ages were beginning to draw to a close. A public clock tower with a dial face marking the hours was a radical innovation, not just because time itself had become magically visible, but also because all those who heard its bells could co-ordinate their daily activities. Shops and markets began to keep regular hours; appointments could be co-ordinated for anyone within earshot.

Tourists travelled in from the country just to stand and stare at these marvels, particularly the most advanced ones, which had dials embraced by scrolled brackets and carved figures that held the clock face like a votive object. But no matter how clocks were dressed up in classical ornamentation, nothing could conceal the austere, geometric modernity of the clock face itself—a window into time. It must have been an extraordinary period, particularly for the wealthy, who could afford to have smaller, personal clocks built for domestic use, much like the first personal computers of the 1980s. We take clock dials for
granted now. They even look a bit quaint beside an LCD digital time display, but they still have a decided modernity to them.

The clock face was a practical solution to the problem of representing the passage of twenty-four hours compactly and simply. All previous timepieces had relied on a linear and often interrupted operation—hourglasses had to be turned upside down when they ran out, clepsydras had to be refilled and maintained at a constant temperature, calibrated candle clocks simply burned down, and sundials could only tell time when the sun was out. The mechanical clock was new, it had its own source of energy. It was independent, almost alive. It was as if a portion of the great river of time had been diverted into a minor eddy, confined and harnessed within the clockwork gears and cogs of the timepiece. Inevitably, those same gears would quantify human lives themselves.

Above my desk I have a digital, Olympic-style time clock that measures not just hours, minutes and seconds, but tenths and even hundredths of seconds. I use it like a chronometric mascot to spur me on; according to it, time isn’t just passing, it’s flying. The clock’s face is a sliding spectrum of time, from coarse to fine. On the left the unmoving hours are posted like newspaper headlines. Next comes the stately procession of minutes, then the seconds ticking by. To the right are the tenths of seconds. They pass by distressingly fast. But it is the hundredths of seconds that I find fascinating. They’re hypnotic, like a waterfall or a light show. They dance furiously, flashing by so quickly I can’t read them. Most wall clocks advance stealthily, almost imperceptibly, but this one gushes. My Olympic clock constantly reminds me that my leisurely perspective on time is an illusion.

In another sense, though, my sports timer confirms the twofold accuracy of a much earlier chronometer: the hourglass. Although an hourglass cannot measure an accurate second, it can gauge a fairly accurate minute and get close to measuring an exact hour. Yet there is something even more exact about it. An hourglass is a perfect functional symbol; it both symbolizes time and measures it. The sand rushes through the present moment, the waist of the hourglass, on its way to the past, the heap of sand at the bottom, in a rushing, dry waterfall. The resemblance between my sports clock and the hourglass deepens here. Just as hundredths of seconds flow faster than tenths of seconds, the speed of the falling sand is faster in the centre of the flow than at the edges, where it is slowed by its contact with the glass. The speed of “now,” in both chronometers, seems infinitely divisible into ever-faster increments.

There is a further parallel, not with my sports clock, but between the hourglass and time. Beyond the hourglass’s direct representation of time’s flow is the correspondence between the shape of the hourglass and the division of time into past, present and future. The reservoirs of future and past, the upper and lower bulbs respectively, are connected by the waist of the present. Perhaps the present moment, our “now,” is more exactly like the waist of the hourglass than we know. “Now” is unmoving, and instead, time rushes through it, giving us the illusory sense that the present moment races from the past towards the future, or that the future flows through it towards the past. Maybe the present moment is more like the lens of a projector that the film of time is playing through.

The hourglass has a final deep parallel with time. If, at the end of time, time reverses and the universe runs backwards, as an astophysicist named Thomas Gold has proposed, then turning the hourglass upside down after the “future” has run out is a perfect allegory. Perhaps the process repeats endlessly, the universe inverting like an egg timer
in a kitchen morning after morning, or like the demon that Nietzsche wrote about (who, like Thomas Gold, we will encounter later on in this book). Finally, there is the analogy between mortality and time running out. The Grim Reaper doesn’t brandish his hourglass idly.

Mechanical clocks had, and still have, an element of mortality to them. Their measured ticks seem to dole out our lives. I remember how, when my mother was in her final days, she would keep glancing at her bedside clock. It was her compass, an absolute within the delerium that slowly overtook her. It was also a solace of sorts. I think the last control she could exercise over the world was to keep track of her daily calendar of events, of impending visits by her home-care nurse and the lonely hours of the night. Clocks are not the enemy, of course. They only measure our mortality. (Though neither are they our friend.) But the connection between clocks and mortality is strong nonetheless. It sometimes seems as if time stalks us, like the ticking clock in the stomach of the crocodile in
Peter Pan.

I doubt that associations of mortality were a factor when clocks were a brand-new technology, when the chiming of the hours became a theme song to the cultural awakening of Europe in the sixteenth century. Still, the measurement of minutes was centuries away. Although the church had already instituted St. Bede the Venerable’s division of the hour into sixty minutes and the minute into sixty seconds, at least on paper, it wasn’t until Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock in 1665 that accurate minutes became a reality and Bede’s abstractions became practicable. Huygens, the son of the famous Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens, was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer. His invention of the pendulum clock was more of a practical necessity than an end in itself; he wanted to measure the motion of the planets
and their moons as precisely as possible. Eleven years later Ole Römer used Huygens’ pendulum to calibrate the occlusion of the moons of Jupiter and came up with the first quantitative estimate of the speed of light: 136,000 miles per second, which although 26 percent lower than the currently accepted speed, was nonetheless very close. It was to be another half-century after Huygens’ pendulum that clocks could measure seconds with any precision.

S
ECONDS

Your average day of 1,440 minutes consists of 86,400 seconds. If the average thirty-day month, then, has 2,592,000 seconds and hence the average year consisting of twelve thirty-day months would consist thereby of 31,104,000 seconds, I have then, in fact, lived (since I am approaching my thirty-sixth year) but 1,088,640,000 seconds.

—
Glenn Gould

When I was a child our family camped every summer in the wilds of northern Ontario. They were idyllic months, canoeing by day and setting up camp in the late afternoon, on an island in the middle of a lake to avoid the mosquitoes that were thicker on the mainland shores. Most of these lakes were so pure you could dip your cup in them and drink. The weather was usually sunny, but on hot afternoons, convection storms would build and cruise over the landscape—brooding cloud-towers with lightning at their bases. Inevitably there were occasional night storms, some of which were terrifically violent. A sleeping bag and a canvas tent don’t feel like much protection in a severe lightning storm, and my father, to allay my fears, taught me how to calculate how far away the storm was
by timing the thunderclaps. You just count the seconds between flash and thunder. Five seconds equalled a mile. For “seconds” we counted out “steamboats,” stopping as soon as we heard the thunder.

Sometimes the storm would miss us, never getting closer than four steamboats, but more often the storm would score almost a direct hit. It was hard to concentrate on counting when the tent was flapping in the wind and the rain drummed down so hard that it sounded like the campsite was being washed away. It was even more difficult to concentrate when there was no delay between the brilliant violet flash of lightning and the bedrock-shaking explosion of thunder. But as the first steamboats began to emerge between the flashes and the thunder, I knew, to my relief, that the storm was finally leaving.

Years later I discovered that not only could you tell how far away the lightning was, you could also, using the same method, map out the lightning branches, particularly the horizontal ones that run parallel to the ground. Now when I hear thunder begin, especially the low, rippling thunder from deep in the clouds, I start counting, and by timing the length of the thunder’s peal I can calculate the length of the lightning branch. Sometimes they are more than a mile long. Using time to measure phenomena is precisely why accurate timepieces became a necessity, and why the second, something that is now so ubiquitous in our vocabulary and experience, was also necessary to quantify.

It turned out that the relationship between time and space, or in this case time zones and longitude, became the incentive to begin measuring precise seconds, and it fell to a carpenter from Yorkshire named John Harrison to devise a clock that could measure them. By the early eighteenth century, Britain was a maritime superpower in command of thousands of oceangoing ships. The difficulty of determining accurate position at sea was one of the greatest dilemmas facing the nation. Faulty navigation led to the loss of ships, lives and valuable cargo, and as more
and more ships plied the sea, the losses mounted. It took the great maritime disaster of 1707 to galvanize England into action. Four Royal Navy ships sailed off course near the coast of the Scilly Isles and ran aground, costing the lives of fourteen hundred sailors. In an act of Parliament in 1714 Britain offered a price of £20,000 (equivalent to US $7 million today) to anyone who could accurately calculate longitude at sea.

Determining latitude had always been easy for sailors. By measuring the angle of the Pole Star and referring to an almanac of sun and star positions, they could judge their latitude exactly. But longitude posed another problem. To measure that you had to have an accurate clock, because you had to subtract your local time from the time at the prime meridian, which runs through Greenwich. A reckoning accurate within a minute would give you your position to within a mile. But there were no clocks capable of doing this at sea, since the wave-induced rolling motion of boats stymied their workings. It was such a long-standing problem that many ships’ navigators simply sailed due south until they reached the correct latitude, then sailed due west or east. Needless to say these were not direct routes.

John Harrison took up the challenge, not just because of the extraordinary prize but also to save lives. He laboured for twenty-seven years, building successively more accurate clocks until his crowning achievement: the No. 4 Chronometer, which was tested on a voyage between Britain and Jamaica in 1761. It was able to maintain its accuracy during the entire voyage. He won the prize.