This article considers the saturation of American cities and towns with government-sponsored public clocks during the Gilded Age. In doing so, it seeks to establish that while clocks are part of the modern technological landscape of order, discipline, and efficiency, they also constitute another terrain of power: that of the state. The article considers the diffusion of government clocks across the nation and the nationalist symbolism associated with many period government clocks as well as clocks in general.
Warren S. Johnson, “The Philadelphia City Hall Clock,”Journal of the Franklin Institute151 (1901): 84-84.
2.
and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983).
3.
Galison locates a “convention of simultaneity” feeding European and American fascination with the coordination of clocks between the 1880s and World War I, which in turn underpinned Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity. In brief, Einstein puzzled over how clocks in a given city could actually keep simultaneous time, given that a time signal from a master clock would travel different distances, thereby taking different amounts of time to actually reach the networked clocks, making it the case that the clocks were not coordinated. Thus, the time kept by the coordinated clocks, as well as the time of various events (such as the arrival of a train), was not actually simultaneous, but rather was considered to be so only through a series of conventions and procedures.
4.
See, for example, Henry F. R. Watts, “Tower Clocks: A Survey of Many Interesting New England Specimens Made before 1850,”Bulletin of NAWCC4 (1950): 94-102.
5.
and Carlene Stephens, On Time: How America Has Learned to Live by the Clock (Boston, 2002).
6.
The Archives Center at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. (hereafter, Archives Center, NMAH-SI) holds the Howard Collection (hereafter, HC), which contains all of the extant Howard account books. Books containing orders for the entire array of clocks produced by the company cover the periods between April 22, 1871 to January 27, 1886; February 1, 1888 to April 1, 1891; November 14, 1892 to January 30, 1899 (Box 8, vol. 1-6; Box 9, vols. 1-3; Box 10, vols. 1-3). An order book for tower clocks includes the period between January 1902 and December 1905 (Box 11, vol. 1) and another book of watch clock orders extends from January 1904 to October 1918 (Box 11, vol. 2). Additionally, a lengthy undated customers’ list in the form of an index is available (Box 12, vols. 3 and 4). The Seth Thomas Company account books (hereafter, ST), held by the NAWCC, detail “Tower Clock Installations” April 1877 to July 1877; September 1877 to April 1883; June 1884 to October 1893; May 1903 to December 1905. There are other books that detail tower clock installations between 1906 and 1936 and an extant index to all tower clock installations between 1872 and 1942. I use data from both the Howard and the Thomas records in a book under contract with the University of Chicago Press, tentatively titled Marking Modern Times: Americans and Their Timepieces, 1850-1940.
7.
The article is based on an extensive, controlled sampling of all the extant Howard account books, excluding one covering watch clock orders. Out of a total of 8,149 orders in the account books, I recorded 2,235 orders, or about 27 percent of the total orders. This article does not consider 241 of these orders that were for parts or repairs. Nine hundred and two Seth Thomas orders constitute all of the surviving orders found in account books covering the years between 1877 and 1893 and 1903 and 1905; this article does not consider 135 of the orders that were for parts or repairs.
8.
O’Malley, Keeping Watch, 146-147.
9.
and Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, 1989).
10.
Wu Hung, “Monumentality of Time: Giant Clocks, the Drum Tower, the Clock Tower,” in Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, eds., Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago, 2003), 107-107.
11.
Graeme Davison, The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time (Melbourne, 1993), 1-2, 18-18, 20-21.
12.
There are some exceptions; see literary critic Thomas Allen, “Clockwork Nation: Modern Time, Moral Perfectionism, and American Identity in Catherine Beecher and Henry Thoreau,”British Journal of American Studies, 29 (2005): 65-86.
13.
On temporal regimes in colonial America and the Early Republic, see David R. Roediger and Philip S. Foner, “Time, Republicanism, and Merchant Capitalism: Consciousness of Hours before 1830,” in Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (New York, 1989), 1-19.
14.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 1983, 1991), 22-37.
15.
Thanks to Bob Karrow of the Newberry Library for bringing this article to my attention; thanks too to the other participants in the Newberry Library Seminar. For another description of national consciousness of simultaneity, see O’Malley, Keeping Watch, 74-74.
16.
About the sale of observatory time signals during the second half of the nineteenth century, see Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford, 2000).
17.
Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps, 47-47. Galison explains, “Newton’s absolute, theological time had no place; instead there stood a procedure. Engineering common time stood where God’s absolute time had been” (p. 44).
18.
See also Wayne K. Durrill, “A Tale of Two Courthouses: Civic Space, Political Power, and Capitalist Development in a New South Community, 1843-1940,”Journal of Social History37 (2002): 659-681. Curiously, Ryan does not consider clocks in her interpretation of the agglomeration of civic symbols on city halls, despite the presence of a four-faced clock beneath New York City Hall’s cupola as captured in many turn-of-the-century photographs.
19.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), 27-27.
20.
For more about techniques of reckoning the time in the nineteenth century, see Bartky, Selling the True Time.
21.
Carlene Stephens, “ ‘The Most Reliable Time’: William Bond, the New England Railroads, and Time Awareness in 19th-Century America,”Technology and Culture30 (1989): 1-24.
22.
and Bartky, Selling the True Time.
23.
and Orville Butler, “From Local to National: Time Standardization as a Reflection of American Culture,” in Elizabeth Garber, ed., Beyond History of Science: Essays in Honor of Robert E. Schofield (Bethlehem, PA, 1990).
24.
and Bartky, Selling the True Time, 153-154.
25.
“Time by Telegraph,”The Railroad Gazette14 (November 17, 1882), 713-713.
26.
Letter from John Rodgers to William F. Allen, dated February 20, 1882, National Archives Record Administration (hereafter, NARA), Record Group 78, Entry 4, vol. 4, pp. 552-55.
27.
Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, “Reworking E. P. Thompson’s ‘Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism,’ ”Time & Society5 (1996): 284-284.
28.
Due to a number of factors, including increased state involvement in urban affairs, buildings housing both County Courthouses and City Halls were typical of the second half of the nineteenth century. William Lebovich, America’s City Halls (Washington, D.C., 1984), 20-20.
29.
About state capitols, see also Charles Goodsell, The American Statehouse: Interpreting Democracy’s Temple (Lawrence, KS, 2001).
30.
Lois Craig, The Federal Presence: Architecture, Politics, and National Design (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 197-197.
31.
Otherwise, to my knowledge no clocks were placed on the exteriors of armories, which were typically modeled after medieval fortresses and castles. Seth Thomas Tower Clocks were erected at the U.S. Army Post at Fort Riley and at the National Soldiers Home in Virginia (Tower Clocks: Manufactured by Seth Thomas Clock Co., 1929, Warshaw Collection, Watch Works and Clock Works, Box 3, Archives Center, NMAH-SI).
32.
Seventy-seven percent of the federal government’s Howard orders (191 orders out of 250) were for a total of 1,203 #70 clocks. Most of the time the orders were for a dozen or so #70 clocks, although the quantities did vary. The United States Lighthouse Department placed the earliest orders for the #70 clock, first for one in 1878 (HC: Box 8, vol. 3, p. 111) and then for thirty-six in 1880 (HC: Box 8, vol. 4, p. 136). Through the 1880s other federal agencies installed #70 clocks, and in the 1890s the bulk of the orders for them were placed. For instance, in 1885 the new Public Building in Jackson, Mississippi, installed eleven #70 clocks (HC: Box 10, vol. 3, p. 117); in 1893 the Chattanooga, Tennessee, Federal Court House and Post Office requested nineteen #70 clocks (HC: Box 9, vol. 3, p. 36); in 1897 the new Detroit Post Office ordered forty-two #70 clocks (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, p. 37); and in 1898 the Racine, Wisconsin Custom House ordered eight #70 clocks (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, p. 112).
33.
Antoinette J. Lee, Architects to the Nation: The Rise and Decline of the Supervising Architect’s Office (New York, 2000), 9-9.
34.
Craig, The Federal Presence, 51-51, 91-91.
35.
Treasury Department orders January 21, 1873 (HC: Box 8, vol. 1, p. 89) and October 15, 1877 (HC: Box 8, vol. 3, p. 64).
36.
Governing agencies placed 102 orders for clocks between November 20, 1883 and December 31, 1885.
37.
Lee, Architects to the Nation, 6-6, 9-9, 111-156.
38.
Clocks were ordered for custom houses in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Fall River (MA), New York City, Port Townsend (WA), Portland (OR), Racine (WI), San Francisco, Savannah, and St. Louis, in addition to Sitka and Alexandria (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, pp. 108, 109, 112, 113, 118, 119, 138, 147, 167); clocks were sent to U.S. Courthouses in Augusta (ME), Binghamton (NY), Brooklyn, Knoxville, Little Rock, Omaha, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Sioux Falls (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, pp. 53, 111, 114, 119, 128, 130, 141, 144, 145, 150, 152, 159, 165); clocks for warehouses of the U.S. Appraiser’s offices (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, pp. 78 and 109); Library of Congress clocks (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, pp. 74 and 87); and Washington, D.C. Post Office (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, pp. 118, 121, 155, 177).
39.
All the federal clocks from Howard’s inventory in the Far West were #70 clocks. They could be found in the Sitka, Alaska Custom House (1898) (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, p. 109); the Sacramento Post Office (1894) (HC: Box 9, vol. 3, p. 184); the San Francisco Custom House and Appraiser’s Storehouse (1898) (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, pp. 108 and 109); Pueblo, Colorado’s Post Office (1898) (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, p. 84); the United States Courthouse and Post Office in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1889) and Carson City, Nevada (1890) (HC: Box 9, vol. 1, p. 280 and Box 9, vol. 2, p. 237); two custom houses in Oregon, Astoria (1893) (HC: Box 9, vol. 3, p. 164) and Portland (1898) (HC: Box 10, vol. 2, p. 108); and Port Townsend, Washington’s Custom House (1893 and 1898) (HC: Box 9, vol. 3, p. 137 and Box 10, vol. 2, p. 108).
40.
About the Des Moines Post Office, see Craig, The Federal Presence, 198-198.
41.
and U. S. Department of War, Army Signal Office, “Information Relative to the Construction and Maintenance of Time Balls,” in Professional Papers of the Signal Service, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C. Government Printing Office, 1881).
42.
For reports about the operation of government time balls in various American cities, see Reports from Branch Hydrographic Offices between 1885 and 1925, NARA, Record Group 37, Entry 64 and Entry 41, Boxes 49-51.
43.
Between the 1870s and 1920, the U.S. Navy installed twenty-five time balls along the oceanic coasts, as well as those of the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. After the Spanish-American War (1898), a time ball was also erected at the Cavite Naval Station in the Philippines. Even after the wireless transmission of time signals was possible, the Navy continued its time ball building program, installing at least eight during the naughts and teens. Often the time ball was the only sign of the presence of the U.S. Navy, and by extension of the federal government. Government buildings at the era’s many expositions frequently sported time balls. “Stations at Which the Signal Service Can, at Present, Maintain Time Balls,” memorandum dated 1881 in William F. Allen Papers, New York Public Library, Box 2, Folder 4; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Commerce, 47th Cong., 1st sess., “Meridian Time and Time Balls on Custom-Houses,” 1882 (House Report 681); “Time Balls,” chart dated 19 October 1886 in United States Naval Observatory (USNO) letters received, USNO, NARA, Record Group 78, Entry 8, Box 4; Reports from Branch Hydrographic Offices between 1885 and 1925, NARA, Record Group 37, Entry 64 and Entry 41, Boxes 49-51.
44.
and Bartky, Selling the True Time, appendix.
45.
Requests for time balls are organized by city in Correspondence of the United States Hydrographic Office, 1908-1927, NARA, Record Group 37, Entry 41, Boxes 49-51.
46.
Counties in Georgia and Texas accounted for more than half of the orders, but orders from counties in the remaining Southern states were evenly distributed.
47.
About the machinations behind building a new county courthouse during the Gilded Age; see Durrill, “A Tale of Two Courthouses,” 665-66. The Union County, North Carolina, court house Durrill studied was not built of local materials, but many county court houses were.
48.
see Mavis P. Kelsey and Donald H. Dyal, The Courthouses of Texas (College-Station, 1993), 22-24.
49.
Lee, Architects to the Nation, 112-112.
50.
About the history of the Waltham Watch Company, see Charles W. Moore, Timing a Century: History of the Waltham Watch Company (Cambridge, UK, 1945).
51.
Bristol placed its order July 19, 1882 (HC: Box 8, vol. 6, p. 55); Essex placed its order August 28, 1893 (HC: Box 9, vol. 3, p. 141); Brockton placed its order May 21, 1894 (HC: Box 9, vol. 3, p. 259).
52.
The dates for the construction of city halls cited found in Lebovich, America’s City Halls, 64-65, 68-69, 82-82, 88-89, 96-96, 102-102, 113-113, 128-128.
53.
“No Clocks for Bingham,” unidentified news clipping dated 1908, James Arthur Collection, Clippings File, Archives Center, NMAH-SI.
54.
Mastered by the Clock, 17-20, 42-48.
55.
“Illuminated Clock Will Be Secured,”Hampshire Gazette, January 25, 1906.
56.
as quoted in Shelley, Early American Tower Clocks, ix-ix.
57.
HC: Box 9, vol. 3, p. 109. The order was placed June 5, 1893. Buffalo, New York’s, Zion’s Evangelical Reformed Church and St. Ames Church also ordered tower clocks for installation in time for July 4, 1895. HC: Box 10, vol. 1, pp. 60 and 89.
58.
Lebovich, America’s City Halls, 49-49.
59.
“The City Hall Clock,”Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 21, 1895.
60.
“To Improve the City Hall,”Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 26, 1895.
61.
“The City Hall Tower,”Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 2, 1896.
62.
and Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York, 1998), 111-114.
63.
Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, 113-113.
64.
Independence Hall Bell and Columbian Liberty Bell, Meneely Bell CompanyCatalogue (1906), Warshaw Collection, Watch and Clockworks, Box 3, Archives Center, NMAH-SI.
65.
Bartky, Selling the True Time, 50-57.
66.
Government agencies ordered 332 striking clocks to install on the exteriors of buildings; 320 of these clocks were tower clocks. Evidence from the Seth Thomas records suggests that nearly all tower clocks were ordered with striking mechanisms: 87 percent (525 out of 603) of all tower clock orders placed between 1877-1893 and 1903-1906, were ordered with striking mechanisms.
67.
as quoted in Craig, The Federal Presence, 242-242.
68.
I took as authoritative Astrid C. Donnellan, “Boston’s Custom House Tower Clock, A Landmark Restored,”NAWCC Bulletin (October 1993): 570-571, because she restored the timepiece.
69.
Durrill, “A Tale of Two Courthouses,”672-673. For example, evidence from one southern county shows that national and Confederate symbols and rituals, including the national flag and Fourth of July parade, were only added to the courthouse square in the several years leading to the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War’s end. Durrill argues that this addition of national and southern symbols and rituals was due to the attempt to forge closer ties between citizen and state in a time when the distance between the two was increasing.
70.
Michael O’Malley and Carlene Stephens, “Clockwork History: Monumental Clocks and the Depiction of the American Past,”NAWCC Bulletin32 (1990): 14-14.
71.
O’Malley and Stephens, “Clockwork History,”4-4.
72.
clipping in Public Property Scrapbooks, 1894-1901, Philadelphia City Archives.
73.
Johnson, “The Philadelphia City Hall Clock.”
74.
See also the clockmaker Warren S. Johnson’s refutation of the charges that his clock was unreliable: Johnson, “The Philadelphia City Hall Clock.”
75.
See Hai Ren, “The Merit of Time: A Genealogy of the Countdown,” in Cathy Gutierrez and Hillel Schwartz, eds., The End That Does: Art, Science, and Millennial Accomplishment (London, forthcoming).
76.
“Dummy Clock to Be Removed,” undated clipping [April 1900?], Public Property Scrapbooks, 1894-1901.
