Time as a Tool to Oppress

Thinking more broadly than the wristwatch as a tool, here is a brief history of how ‘time’ itself has been used as a tool - a tool to oppress - and how people rebelled. 

‘Time’ as we know it isn’t real. You may already know why. ‘Time’ simply denotes the moving of the earth on it’s axis; one revolution of the earth is one day and one day is two revolutions of the hour hand around the dial of a watch or clock. So before ‘time’ - and by this I mean before timekeeping - people did pretty much what they could or wanted to do when they wanted to or could. You’d work when its light and sleep when it’s dark; you’d eat when you’re hungry and rest when you’re tired.

Such was life for civilisation until the introduction of sundials to the Roman Forum. These new sundials dictated when the Romans woke-up, when they worked, when they rested and when they stopped working and went to bed. It quickly became clear that the sundial was a tool to oppress, and were decidedly unpopular at the time. One disgruntled roman playwright, Plautus, exclaimed: 

The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours… who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits for poor old me… When I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial… But now what there is isn’t eaten until the sun says so… 

An ancient sundial in the Forum in Rome, originally plundered from Sicily in the early years of the Roman Empire

Time has been politicised by governments to bring order - to dictate what happens when. This institution of ‘standard time’ is a staple of modernity which is now taken for granted, because it continued into the industrial revolution, where clocks were used to measure the efficiency and output of labour. Ironic as it is, horology thus had a vital role in the Protestant work ethic which grew in Switzerland (where most fine watches are made today). Benjamin Franklin (yes, that Benjamin Franklin), in his essay Advice to a Young Tradesman, first coined the phrase ‘time is money’. In Britain, timekeeping was used to maximize profits from the labour of the working classes. In a factory in Dundee, the clocks were put forward in the morning and back in the afternoon in order to get more work out of employees without them realising it.

The first page of Franklin’s Advice to a Young Tradesman

But some did realise the source of their oppression and rebelled! The Luddites of the industrial revolution are famed for destroying the looms and steam engines found in such textiles factories, but the first thing they smashed were the clocks. One night in 1912, a group of suffragettes actually blew up the Edinburgh observatory. In the modern world, where the idea that timekeeping is used as an oppressive tool is taken for granted, it’s hard to understand why the suffragettes targeted an observatory. The answer is that it was because the men in the observatory were upholding the status-quo, which suffragettes so hated, by standardising society with time. 

Nowadays, the mechanical watch is seen, at least by the likes me, as a small rebellion against omnipresent phones, text-notifications and social media buzzing. But ironically, mechanical timekeepers in the past were smashed in a similar vein - to rebel against cruelty and control.