By the Clock

Ian R. Bartky. Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 32 pp. Illustrations and notes. $45.00.

In his first book, Ian R. Bartky examines the history of American observatories during the nineteenth century in order to "assess the significance of time services in the development of American astronomy" (p. 3). He shows that time services provided some of the revenue and much of the raison d'être for many fledgling observatories. But the scope suggested by the book's title and the chapter topics extends far beyond the institutional history of the handful of observatories established in the United States during the nineteenth century. Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America takes up the role of railroads, government agencies, universities, timepiece manufacturers, and telegraph and telephone companies in shaping a national system of uniform time. This system encompasses not only "Standard Railway Time" and time zones, but also the institutional practices and technologies at the heart of time distribution. Bartky seeks to establish firsts, and his detailed and massive amount of archival work allows him to do so with certitude. He begins in the 1790s when the brothers Benjamin and Samuel Demilt built an observatory in New York City to rate marine chronometers. The book's highpoint takes place in the 1880s when uniform time was established in 1883 and eighteen observatories were selling and distributing this time. To conclude, Bartky describes an alliance, between the United States Naval Observatory and the Western Union Telegraph Company, which by the 1890s put all other American observatories out of the business of selling time.

Timekeeping itself is an under-studied social, cultural, and technological practice; thankfully the quality of the few published studies tends toward excellence. Mark M. Smith's important book Mastered by the Clock (1997) investigates the social history of watch and clock ownership in the antebellum South. It is the only full-length study concerning timepiece ownership and use in the United States, and its remarkable findings, such as the high incidence of using the clock in addition to the whip in slave discipline, point to the potential rewards of such studies. Michael O'Malley's Keeping Watch (1990) and Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time and Space (1983) take up the cultural effects of widespread timepiece ownership in the United States and Europe. Each study rests on the assumption that by the close of the nineteenth century a multitude of forces had remade time into a commodity form. David S. Landes's well-known Revolution in Time (1983) concerns the scientific and technological history of timekeeping with a focus on European developments and contributions to the practice. Coming closest to being a complete history of timekeeping is Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum's impressive History of the Hour (1992), which explains in great detail how Europeans came to reckon time according to the hour and establishes when and under which circumstances public and church clocks were erected throughout Europe. Dohrn-van Rossum's findings undermine the widely held assumption that Europeans moved from church to merchant's time by the end of the Middle Ages. Bartky's book, which is strictly a technological history of timekeeping, belongs in this small but stellar array of books. It is the first published study concerning the systemization of the determination and distribution of time in nineteenth-century America, arguably the critical era for the imposition of clock time upon every aspect of American life.

Before the clock became dominant, multiple temporal systems shaped everyday life. By and large, almanacs codified these systems; for several centuries they publicized various measures of time, including the all- important "ephemeris." Isaiah Thomas's 1799 almanac, for instance, demarcated several temporal systems. On the cover it emphasized that of Christianity's New and Old Testaments (the year of the Lord, the year of creation), that of the reformed Gregorian calendar with its leap years, and that of the nation's history, noting twenty-three...