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1883: |
The adoption of the new standard time on Sunday and Monday next will be universal in Brattleboro. The employees of the railroad companies are under orders to take the new time at the telegraph office at noon on Sunday. Estey & Co., Smith & Hunt, Crosby & Co., and the Asylum will all set their clocks and blow their whistles by the new standard on Monday. |
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/nov18.html
Timing
Times change. Literally.
Back then, keeping everyone in town on the same schedule was a bit different. The jewelers, who sold watches, usually had the most precise time-keeping tools, but the trains had influence. Some of the companies in town had direct lines to the jewelers to keep their clocks on schedule.
As factory whistles started to blow, particularly at Estey, everyone in town began to work on the same marks of time.
Once everyone it town is in sync, then we could look out and align with the entire country.
I wondered
This is interesting. If I knew this, I forgot it. Thanks for posting this.
time keeps on ticking
Timekeeping, and money, are human inventions. At one point we all lived perfectly well without knowing about either. Then we kept track by watching the stars. Then we switched to machines, standardization, and keeping everything in sync.
(Has anyone made a movie about time falling apart, and everything going out of sync?)
popular sub genre
Plenty of flixs play with the idea of time:
Groundhog Day, Memento, etc…then there are the myriad time travel movies, Back to Futures, x years BC, Dr. Whoms, Idiocracy..
If you look closely it seems we’re obsessed with the notion of malleable time. Not sure though if there’s ever been a feature about time itself being destroyed or degraded.
Coming soon, “Relativity, the Movie…Just when you thought it was safe to be on time”
maybe no drama
Yeah, lots of jumping around in time, and looping. I can’t think of any where time degrades or falls apart entirely. Not even quite sure what that would look like (or where the drama would come from. It might just be nice.)
Though, thinking of story arcs, there might be room for some impossible situations (where our hero is up against a proverbial wall and there is no way out!)(until they find it).
Every see Dr Science discuss relativity on his TV show? He rides his bike really fast, then his headlight jumps off and goes at a different pace.
Time works on scale, and does its own stunts too
Film is the ultimate linear Art, we can play with speeds, or sequence, change the number of frames per second..but the show goes from start to finish, with a gap between to swap audiences and begin again.
There’s that famous proto-tweet, “Time was invented to keep everything from happening at once…”
I was surprised to learn this year that daylight savings time/ standard time.. was implemented in over forty different configurations across the globe, not even accounting for the time zone differences. Shows how arbitrary such a harsh taskmaster can be.
My hunch is that it’s not so much that disintegrated time would diminish drama. Warhol played with the concept of duration, (Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Von Trier too) More that commerce has now dictated such a feverish pace and sliced-up attention spans, that anything seriously undermining this, and throwing people onto the imponderable nature of eternity would terrify beyond entertainment, and make zero dollars.
frame of reference
Let’s develop a channel that plays random single frames in succession 24-7. More seriously, a channel that just played ads would probably be popular.
Interesting part of film being an illusion, and the persistence of vision. Perhaps all films already are breaking time into discreet elements to rearrange.
I think it was Norman McClaren that said that animation is what happens between frames. The illusion comes not from what is shown but from what the mind fills in.