Introduction: Keeping Time

Already in what they call their “pre-history,” humans kept, measured, and calculated time by looking at the revolutions of the sun, the planets, and the stars in the sky. Within the long history of time, one could define modernity by two technological innovations that shift timekeeping from the macrocosm to the microcosm. The first innovation, an initial step away from astronomical time, is the invention of the pendulum clock. The legend of Galileo’s epiphany, as recorded by his biographer Vincenzo Viviani, defines a decisive moment: the moment in the cathedral of Pisa when he became aware of the isochronism of the pendulum, that the time it takes to swing back and forth is independent of the amplitude of the swing. The pendulum clock emerged from Galileo’s experiments, and Huygens’s implementation of the laws discovered by means of these experiments, into a working device during the seventeenth century. The second major technological innovation in timekeeping that is definitive of the modern era is the atomic clock. This clock brought time down to earth once and for all and initiated the complete decoupling of time measurement from astronomical time. Claude Audoin and Bernard Guinot note in The Measurement of Time that the cesium beam–frequency standard began regular operation in the United Kingdom in 1955, heralding the use of atomic properties for time measurement,¹ and that the first commercial cesium clock—the “atomichron”—was manufactured a year later.² At the Thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures, the atomic definition of the second was officially ratified. No longer a fraction of an hour or a day, “the second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of cesium 133 atoms.”³ Although one of the most radical events in the history of timekeeping, the invention of the atomic clock took place in the twentieth century with little public fanfare, and even years later the atomic clock remains widely unknown. Perhaps, as Audoin and Guinot speculate, this is due to “a reaction to the lack of poetry in atomic clocks, or their inscrutable accuracy.”⁴ Conditioned to think of time in terms of solar and lunar revolutions, could it be that we are neither ready nor easily able to integrate an alternative into our daily lives? In our social practices and internal awareness of time, are we not keeping up with the inventions of newer and more accurate modes of timekeeping driven by scientific and technological innovation? Part of the strangeness of atomic time lies precisely in this perceived detachment from the communal experience of time that informs our lives, despite the fact that relatively common objects, such as GPS devices, are implicated in the coordination of atomic clocks through satellites. Although atomic clocks synchronize our lives in basic ways, it is fair to say that they have not yet claimed a foothold in the popular imagination.

Even if the cultural implications of the atomic clock are for future generations to discover, there is ample evidence that the history of modern timekeeping technology up to that point is far more than a simple record of its scientific discoveries and practical applications: a look at earlier cases quickly reveals that it includes far-reaching effects on the human experience and recording of time. In literary studies, for example, where the study of time in terms of the temporality of narration or the narrated time of events is a familiar topic, very recent scholarship has taken up the many connections between technological progress in timekeeping and the manifold strategies and preferences of time organization that inform a literary text. In Telling Time, a study of the relation between clocks and diurnal literary forms in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Stuart Sherman writes about the fundamental relationship between the “counting” and “telling” of time—between techniques of calculation and modes of expression: “clocks count time (OE tellan, to narrate, is cognate with Middle Low German tellen, to count, reckon), or rather, they make it available for human...