A Brief History of Punctuality
Expanding on my comments in the NYT
I got an email last week from Katherine Rosman, a reporter at the New York Times, asking to talk to me for a story she was writing about punctuality, and because I am an incredible dope, my first thought was “Why are you contacting me?” Apparently it only takes a few months to completely forget my most recent book…
Anyway, I spoke to her on the phone for a while last week, and the story went live on the NYT website yesterday. The hook is pretty much in the title, “Punctuality Is Having a Moment,” the idea being that in the last several months, people seem to be much more concerned about being on time for things, and less into being “fashionably late.” A lot of people (myself included in the last quote of the piece) connect this to the pandemic: people who are working remotely are less subject to the vagaries of commuting, and thus find it easier to be on time, and even do tbings earlier in the day than they otherwise would’ve.
I’m there for a bit of historical context, about the evolution of ideas of timekeeping and what it means to be “on time.” This is a question that came up a lot in the publicity cycle for the book, and initially I was caught a little off guard by it, because the people asking questions seemed to have an idea that prior to the invention of pocket watches, nobody kept to any kind of a schedule.
In fact, though, the idea of keeping to something that we would recognize as a regular schedule is remarkably ancient. There’s a hieroglyphic inscription from around 1500 BCE where an Egyptian court official named Amenemhet lists as one of his accomplishments the invention of a timekeeping device for accurately tracking the hours of the night as they change through the course of the year. What he’s bragging about is almost certainly a water clock with the general form of the Karnak clepsydra, dating from a couple hundred years later: a tapered vessel with an outlet hole in the bottom and a set of hourly scales marked on the inside, one for each month of the Egyptian civil calendar. This would be filled with water to a pre-set level and then allowed to drain, with the time being read off the appropriate scale.
The difference between the longest and shortest nights of the year in Egypt is a bit less than four hours, so the change in the length of a single hour would be maybe 20 minutes total. The taper of the vessel— wider at the top than the bottom— keeps the rate at which the water level drops relatively constant, and tests with a modern reconstruction suggest it was probably good to within 20 minutes over the course of the entire night— running a little slow at the start and a little fast at the end. That’s remarkably good for 1500 BCE, and suggests that people (at least the elite preisthood) cared about having timekeeping accurate to a few minutes even thousands of years ago.
Large numbers of clocks (and fragments of clocks) following this general design have been found in ancient sites around the Mediterranean, with dates of origin spanning a couple thousand years, so this wasn’t some quirky affectation of the reign of Amenhotep I. There are also written descriptions of more sophisticated clocks, such as the ones famously attributed to Ctesibius in the 200s BCE, which dealt with the changing flow rate in a variety of ingenious ways. There is also a good deal of evidence of timekeeping as a public affair, not just a secretive concern of the elites, with sundials and water clocks set up in public squares around the ancient world, and references to drums and trumpets and the like being used to signal the hours through the course of the day. People have cared about being “on time” for thousands of years.
This seems surprising to a fair number of the people who ask about it, which I think probably comes about from the misconception that absolutely everything was kind of casually agrarian. If everyone’s a farmer working their own plot, you get up whenever you get up, work the fields during the day, and go to sleep when you’re done, without much need to subdivide the day. And, you know, that kind of fuzzy timekeeping can totally fly when you’re dealing only with family-sized groups who all live in the same place and know each other.
But, of course, even thousands of years ago, there were cities and large-scale public works projects, and that demands a bit more ability to coordinate activities between relative strangers over a wide range of space. Thus, you get public clocks, and announcements of the time at regular intervals, and all that stuff. Was this looser than modern notions of punctuality? Almost certainly— overseers working on the pyramids probably weren’t operating on “Vince Lombardi time” where being five minutes early barely counts as on time— but there’s a lot of space between the totally unstructured agrarian day many people imagine and what we have today.
There is a very definite change in the attitude toward time and the subdivision of the day that starts with the invention of mechanical clocks somewhere in the 1200 CE range (the actual invention is hazy), and especially once pendulum clocks came around in the mid-1600’s. That’s famously when mechanical clocks began to add minute hands, because prior to that point the accuracy wasn’t good enough to bother. Even before then, though, small clocks and pocket watches were a status symbol, though few of them were good enough to keep really accurate time over an extended period. High quality clocks and watches start to become consumer items as you move through the 1700’s into the 1800’s, and were fairly common by the middle 1800’s. In the latter half of the century, you get the development of mass-produced watches of high quality— by 1900, there are companies selling “dollar watches,” a price point around the average daily wage of a manual laborer. These would be good to a minute or so over a couple of weeks, which would be bad if you were trying to find your longitude at sea, but is more than good enough to coordinate schedules at more or less the level that people do today. The digital clock in my car seems to drift off by a couple minutes a month, and that’s no trouble at all.
Starting in the late 1800’s, a woman by the name of Ruth Belville famously operated a time service in London, where she would set her heirloom watch according to the clocks at Greenwich Observatory, and then carry it to clients across the city, allowing them to re-set their clocks to match the official time. She kept this up until the Second World War, when it just wasn’t practical for an 86-year-old woman to hike through the aftermath of the Blitz. For a less boutique servce, public clocks in train stations and the like were synchronized with high precision over the telegraph networks, so even a cheap watch could be readily re-set to something very close to the correct time as often as needed.
And, of course, these days we’re constantly surrounded by highly accurate and well-synchronized clocks. Anything connnected to the Internet is generally synchronized to the official atomic time maintained by standards labs around the world to within a fraction of a second. My desktop computer’s clock is currently 926 milliseconds behind the correct time, according to the NIST time service, which is actually about as bad as I’ve ever seen it. It’s often within a few tens of milliseconds.
And I think this plays a role in the increased punctuality that kicked off the NYT story— people who are working remotely are almost always sitting at a computer where the time is prominently displayed for them, attending Zoom meetings tracked in calendar apps that provide a minute-by-minute countdown to the next time they need to log in. We’ve got an ability to know the correct instant for doing our appointed tasks at a level of precision that would absolutely boggle the mind of Amenemhet the water clock entrepreneur and his contemporaries. The impulse to be on time, though, is something they would absolutely recognize.
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And if you’ve got questions or quibbles about this condensed potted history of people trying to be on time, the comments will be open: