Standardized Time and Space, and Mass Production

November 2, 1840. London, Paddington Station.

A man standing on the platform pulls a pocket watch from his coat. Its hands read 10:15. But the great clock on the station wall reads 10:20. The man arrived five minutes before his train was to depart, yet the conductor told him he was late. Because London time and Bristol time were not the same.

In the world before the Industrial Revolution, time differed from place to place. The moment the sun reached its peak was noon. When it was noon in London, the regions to the west were still in the morning. People lived by the rhythms of nature. They worked when the sun rose and rested when it set. Time was flexible, slow, and local.

But once the steam locomotive arrived, things grew complicated.

The train moved fast. On the way from London to Bristol, the position of the sun shifted, and local time changed with it. How should train times be set? By London time, or by the time of the destination? The timetables were a mess, and accidents happened. Trains running on different times now risked colliding on the same track.

In the end, the railway companies made a decision. Unify every clock to London time. They took the time of the Greenwich Observatory as the standard. This was the first moment in human history that social time, rather than natural time, was given priority. Even if the sun had not risen, when the clock pointed to twelve, it was noon. Humans went from servants of the sun to servants of the clock.

This change carried straight into the factory.

When the factory siren sounded, it was time to clock in. When the lunch bell rang, it was time to eat; when the closing bell rang, people went home. Work was sliced into minutes. To raise efficiency, every single motion was measured, and unnecessary movements were eliminated. Humans were treated like parts of a machine. So that the machine would never stop, humans worked in shifts. The factory stayed lit through the night, and the city never slept.

The standardization of time led to the compression of space.

The railroad ironed out the wrinkles of the earth. Mountains were bored through with tunnels; valleys were spanned with bridges. A distance that took ten days on horseback could now be covered in a single day by train. Space was no longer an absolute barrier. Raw materials were carried to the factories, products to the ports, and from there ships set out for every corner of the world. As the speed of logistics rose, so did the velocity of capital.

This current was completed in the system of mass production.

In America, Eli Whitney introduced interchangeable parts while manufacturing muskets. If a single screw, a single gear, was made to the same specification no matter where it was produced, a broken part could easily be replaced. This announced the end of the age of handcraft. The era in which artisans shaped each piece by hand was setting. In its place came the era of assembling standardized parts.

Henry Ford later perfected this by introducing the conveyor belt. Now the car moved instead, while the worker stayed in place and repeated the same motion. The Model T was produced only in black. Diversifying the colors would have slowed production. The efficiency of production took priority over the tastes of the consumer.

This also meant the standardization of human life.

People woke at the same time, wore the same clothes, and used products made in the same factories. Cities filled with similar buildings, and ways of life became uniform. Diversity was regarded as the enemy of efficiency. Standardized humans, standardized time, standardized space. This is how industrial civilization was completed.

And yet, when you look closely at this system, something strange comes into view.

Just as standardized parts make up a machine, standardized humans made up society. The individual functioned as a cog in a vast industrial machine. Each person's role was fixed, and replaceable. When one person dropped out, another filled the spot. The system took precedence over the individual.

This was another stage in human evolution.

The human being was integrated from an individual existence into a part of a system. If the printing press awakened the inner life of the individual, the Industrial Revolution connected the individual to an external system. Humans were no longer isolated islands. They became nodes in a vast network, linked by railroads and telegraphs, by roads and ports.

But here a limit revealed itself.

The mechanical body moved fast, but the nervous system coordinating those machines was still slow. The train ran at a hundred kilometers an hour, yet its operating orders had to be delivered by telegram. The factory produced quickly, yet its orders had to arrive by mail. The body had already entered the industrial age, but the nervous system still lingered in the pre-industrial one.

This mismatch created a bottleneck. Energy and matter moved quickly, but information was still bound to the speed at which a person could travel. To control the enormous body that the steam engine had built, a faster nervous system was needed. Something as fast as an electric signal flowing over a copper wire.

At the very moment the extension of the body was nearing completion, humanity once again faced its own limit. This time it was the limit of the nerves. Why, with all these machines, does it still take days to deliver information? Why can we not convey our intentions without meeting in person?

After the liberation of force came the liberation of connection. Before the smoke of the steam engine had even cleared, a new set of blood vessels — wires — began to cover the earth. An invisible force called electricity was preparing to breathe life into the body of the Industrial Revolution.

Next: Chapter 2, The Extension of the Body, The Industrial Revolution | From Energy to Information — The Veins of Civilization Are Opened