How Time Stopped Moving in Circles and Began Running on Rails
Throughout its history, humanity has accumulated a vast array of rules for calculating and interpreting what time means. These interpretations have always been flexible, shaped by different factors, and have changed over the centuries. How does our perception of time differ from that of a person in the Middle Ages or the Enlightenment? What shapes our relationship with this concept? What has the democratization of time and the widespread ability to observe it led to? And why does the idea of the end of the world no longer trouble humanity as it did a thousand years ago?
Reflecting on Albrecht Altdorfer’s painting “The Battle of Alexander at Issus” (1529), German historian Reinhart Koselleck wrote that in medieval Europe, time was marked by “expectations,” and so the painting was full of omens. When German poet and critic Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) encountered “The Battle of Alexander” in the Louvre nearly three centuries after it was created, he was dazzled by “seeing this miracle,” but for him, the painting had no deeper meaning—it was simply a work of art from a particular historical era. As Koselleck argued, over those three hundred years, the very idea of “time” had undergone a transformation.
When Altdorfer painted the battle scene, the chaos of daily life was mixed with fear of the inevitable end of the world (eschaton, as it’s called in the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible). The rise of the Ottoman Empire, in particular, was a direct cause for anxiety, and the Antichrist, in a more theological sense, provoked widespread unease. By the early 19th century, time for Europeans no longer foretold an inevitable apocalypse. Instead, it began a journey from Isaac Newton’s “absolute, true, and mathematical time” toward the modern cesium clock.
Time became linear, and after the French Revolution of 1789, the future began to sound like a promise of utopia. To speed up progress, post-revolutionary France boldly declared that 1792 would be the first year of a new calendar. Months were divided into three “decades” of ten days each, and days were split into 10 hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and so on. Then, in 1929, the USSR under Stalin abolished the seven-day week and replaced it with a five-day week, naming the days yellow, pink, red, purple, and green. In 2002, the President of Turkmenistan announced that January would henceforth be called “Turkmenbashi,” after his official title as “Head of the Turkmen.” Again and again, our clocks and calendars have become hostages to the ideological needs of the state.
More importantly, as German historian Jürgen Osterhammel notes in his book The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (2009), the democratization of time—thanks to public clocks in city squares and later the availability of wristwatches—changed how 19th-century North Atlantic societies understood their connection to the spread of uniform time. But this also created problems. In Germany, where five time standards existed, it took a bold campaign by Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder to convince parliament to establish a single time standard based on the Greenwich Meridian. As historian Vanessa Ogle writes in her book The Global Transformation of Time (2015):
“Overcoming the regionalism inherent in observing five different local times was as much a matter of national security as it was of nation-building.”
Outside Europe, much of the world followed various rules and interpretations of what time meant. In India, diverse Hindu almanacs offered extremely complex divisions of time, nested within each other—from microseconds used for rituals to vast cosmological epochs describing the universe and space itself. For the Lakota people in America, time included hours tied to the movement of the moon; October was “the month of falling leaves,” as author Jay Griffiths writes in her book Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time (1999). In Burundi, those dark, pitch-black nights when faces could no longer be recognized were called “Who are you?” nights. In the Islamic world, the first prayer of the day was to be recited when “the white thread (light) of dawn could be distinguished from the black thread (darkness of night).”
In Rajasthan, the “hour of cow dust” still exists. This phrase describes the melancholy of evenings when cows, at the end of the day, return from the pastures, raising clouds of dust; Michael Ondaatje describes this in a poem:
“This is the hour when we move slowly
in the last possibilities of light.”
Traditional Japanese divided the year into 72 micro-seasons called “ko,” each lasting five days (for example, March 16–20 is when “caterpillars become butterflies”). These gradations of time are long enough to remember, but short enough to remind us how fleeting the present is. Time was born from intuitions, rhythms of nature, religious prescriptions, and the needs of agriculture.
The Railroad Revolution and the Standardization of Time
By the mid-19th century, the railroad revolution, which connected distant parts of Europe and the United States, revealed that every city and town kept its own time. The larger the country, the greater the discrepancy. In North America alone, there were at least 75 time standards. In 1884, thanks to the efforts of Scottish-Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming, the International Meridian Conference was held in Washington, D.C., to rationalize time for the entire world. From then on, there would be a single “world time” with 24 time zones. Political resistance within countries to any changes—even to the mechanical aspects of timekeeping—was impressive.
In the colonial world, efforts to standardize time were inseparable from anti-colonial sentiments and the challenges of forging new national identities. On December 1, 1881, British Governor of Bombay James Fergusson announced that from that day, “all government-controlled institutions would use Madras time, which would be the official time for all purposes.” Madras time, used in the southern coastal city of Madras, was 40 minutes ahead of local Bombay time. Newspapers erupted in heated debate over which time should be used where. The Bombay Chamber of Commerce campaigned for a referendum on whether the university tower clock should show Madras or Bombay time. As expected, Bombay residents voted for Bombay time, and Fergusson’s administration, seeking to demonstrate the consequences of disobeying orders, stopped funding the clock’s nighttime lighting due to the “criminal” display of unofficial time. As Ogle notes, it took nearly 44 years after the establishment of Indian Standard Time in 1906 for the Bombay Municipal Corporation to finally abandon Bombay time, thus ending the little-known “battle of the clocks.”
Since the mid-20th century, the standardization of time has become a key part of postcolonial nation-building. For example, in the past decade, North Korea has repeatedly shifted its clocks by half an hour to reflect reconciliation or tension with its southern neighbors. In contrast, India, which stretches nearly 3,000 kilometers from west to east—meaning the far ends of the country see sunrise almost two hours apart—stubbornly refuses to establish more than one time zone. In a recent study, “Poor Sleep: Sunset Time and the Production of Human Capital” (2018), economist Maulik Jagnani argued that delaying average sunset time by one hour reduces children’s education by 0.8 years due to lack of sleep and early school start times. He estimated that moving from one to two time zones could increase human capital by about $4.2 billion.
The Human Experience of Time in the Modern World
Amid all these transformations of time—mediated by reason, history, and the state—the human experience of modernity continues to defy simple categorization. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus reminds us:
“You cannot step into the same river twice.”
Over a thousand years later, Saint Augustine reflected on time in a more personal, even confessional way: he knew what time was, but when he tried to describe it, he could not. Another millennium passed, and French philosopher Michel Serres wrote that “time does not flow, it seeps.” According to Serres, time was no longer a freely flowing stream, but rather a coagulant that partially passes through the sieve of the human mind, bearing witness to our shaky self-assurances that this is a unique moment, as well as to our deep-seated fear that we are doomed to relive the present over and over again.
The constant, watchful gaze of algorithms—run by governments, corporations, and technologies that document our every move—seems to bet on this concept of eternal return: given enough time to observe, their learning algorithms will fully understand us. Time becomes the fire in which the steel of surveillance is forged. Amid all these great, powerful forces vying to control and influence us, we live our lives as if we are immortal. The episodic quests for freedom we embark on to find our elusive selves remain our only way to bear witness to our presence on this earth. Everything else, as we know deep down, is ultimately subject to time.
“The Battle of Alexander at Issus” / Wikimedia Commons