Clockwatching: The Enigma of Clocks in Nineteenth-Century America

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the variety and extent of timekeepers in the United States increased so dramatically that clockwatching became a national characteristic, a nearly unavoidable habit and predilection.  Nevertheless, few entirely trusted or relied upon mechanical time.  Until the 1880s there was no agreed upon time standard with which to set clocks or ring bells, nor was there a reliable way to set or synchronize timekeepers.  What is more, many timekeeping mechanisms ran poorly, and most broke.  Regardless of the time they conveyed, then, clocks and watches were enigmatic, disseminating a shifting and unstable measure of time.  So, while public spaces became saturated with façade, tower and post clocks, urban and rural households acquired an increasing variety of domestic clocks, and the trade in pocket watches intensified to an unimaginable degree, mechanical timekeepers’ authority for the time remained unstable.  Even after the implementation of a national time standard in 1883, improvements in manufacture of clockworks and watch movements, and the establishment of several different ways to set and synchronize clocks, clocks’ authority for the time remained incomplete.  My comments will explore several incidents that underscore the widespread awareness of the enigmatic nature of mechanical time in nineteenth century America.  In doing so, I use and extend the concept of clockwatching, which the historian Michael J. Sauter introduced in his 2007 AHR article on time discipline in early modern Berlin. As a whole, these comments serve to challenge simplistic assertions about the relationship between clocks and modernity, to wit, that clock time is both a cause and an effect of modernity.