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Does Anybody Really Know What
Time It Is?
By HOWARD MANSFIELD
Hancock, N.H.
NOT long ago, clocks were thought to
be dangerous. Folklore had it that two
of them ticking in the same room could
bring “sure death.” It’s easy to see how
this belief arose. The clocks were almost
certain to disagree, and in the space
between two chimings of one hour,
uncertainty crept in; the machines’
authority was undermined. We don’t
like to be reminded that clock time is
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Daylight saving time, which begins on
Sunday, is unsettling in the same way.
Winding the clock forward in March
and back in November is like bian-
nually changing the measure of an inch.
This tinkering with clocks is our inheri-
tance from a people obsessed with time.
Clocks spread rapidly in early America.
They were expensive imports, but popu-
lar among the Puritans, who despised
idleness. Massachusetts passed a law
in 1663 making the wasting of time
a crime: “No person, householder or
other shall spend his time idly or unpro-
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A century later, the Boston-born Ben-
jamin Franklin (“time is money”) pro-
posed a version of daylight saving time
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as a joke to stop slothful Parisians from
sleeping in. But it was an English Puri-
tan, Ralph Thoresby, who invented an
early alarm clock.
Printed with
By the mid-19th century, Americans
were producing their own clocks.
Workshops in Connecticut produced
cheap models with wooden gears. Ped-
dlers sold them from coast to frontier.
Copyright © 2010 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted with permission.
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Opinion
The “Yankee clock peddlers” managed
to “stick up a clock in every cabin in
the western country,” reported George
William Featherstonhaugh, an English
geographer who visited the States.
“Wherever we have been, in Kentucky,
in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and
here in every dell of Arkansas, and in
cabins where there was not a chair to
sit on, there was sure to be a Connec-
ticut clock.”
But all these clocks were like many
Americans themselves: individual,
conforming to their own notions. There
were hundreds of local times, each city
setting its city hall or courthouse clock
to match its own solar noon. When it
was 12 p.m. in Chicago, it was 11:50 a.m.
in St. Louis and 12:18 p.m. in Detroit.
But that wasn’t a problem because local
time was all that mattered.
That changed when the railroads began
to unify the country. The railroads ran
by their own time, which vexed trave-
lers trying to make connections. Many
stations had two clocks, one for railroad
time and one for local time.
To eliminate the confusion, railroads
took it upon themselves in 1883 to di-
vide the country into four time zones,
with one standard time within each
zone. To resist could mean economic
isolation, so at noon on Nov. 18, 1883,
Chicagoans had to move their clocks
back 9 minutes and 32 seconds. It’s as
if the railroads had commanded the
sun to stand still, The Chicago Tribune
wrote. Louisville was set back almost
18 minutes, and The Louisville Cou-
rier-Journal called the change a “com-
pulsory lie.” In a letter to the editor, a
reader demanded to know “if anyone
has the authority and right to change
March 10, 2011
the city time without the consent of
the people?” In an 1884 referendum,
three-quarters of voters in Bangor, Me.,
opposed the 25-minute change to “Phi-
ladelphia time.”
One sees the same annoyance with the
“compulsory lie” of daylight saving
time. When it was being debated in
1916, The Literary Digest saw it as a
trick to make “people get up earlier by
telling them it is later than it really is.”
The Saturday Evening Post asked, in
jest, “why not ‘save summer’ by having
June begin at the end of February?” And
an Arkansas congressman lampooned
the time reformers by proposing that
we change our thermometers: move the
freezing point up 13 degrees and a lot
of folks could be tricked into burning
less fuel to heat their houses.
We adopted daylight saving time (du-
ring World War I), rejected it (after the
war), adopted it again (during World
War II), and then left it up to the states
and localities until 1966, when Congress
once more decided it was a national
concern. And as much as we complain
and point out that it doesn’t make
anyone more productive or save any
energy, it persists. Almost every state
has eight months of it each year and
only four months of so-called standard
time. As a result, today we rose with
the dawn and next week we’ll be eating
breakfast in darkness.
The change is disconcerting. But more
unsettling still is the mystery we’d ra-
ther not face: If clock time isn’t real,
what is time, anyway? We don’t unders-
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to admit that our allotment is limited.
We just want to get on with our day.
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“Turn and Jump: How Time and Place
Fell Apart.”
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Copyright © 2010 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted with permission.
For subscriptions to The New York Times, please call 1-800-NYTIMES. Visit us online at www.nytimes.com.
For more information about reprints contact PARS International Corp. at 212-221-9595 x425.