Running on Railroad Time
I was recently reading an excellent new book on the Battle of Waterloo* in which the author made an off-hand comment about the difficulty of synchronizing accounts even when sources give exact times for events because there was no standardized time.
Until the rise of the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century, time was essentially local. With the exception of the few points where public institutions intersected private schedules,** most people’s lives were measured by sun time rather than clock time.*** Clocks became more important with the industrial revolution and the growth of factories; whole communities found their lives regulated by the factory whistle. But even when two places used the same calendar,**** there was no way to synchronize their clock towers. More importantly, there was no reason to. The factory in No Place In Particular had no need to match its schedule to the factory in The Town Over The Hill.
That all changed with the railroads.
Railroads were born in Britain in 1825, using technologies developed in the British mining industry. The first public railway, the Stockton and Darlington, carried six hundred passengers over a twenty-six mile line in only four hours on its first trip. Over the next twenty years, investors formed more than six hundred rail companies that together laid more than ten thousand miles of track in Britain--transforming train travel from a novelty to a necessity. As rail travel became more common, differences in local time (sometimes as much as twenty minutes!) became a problem. In 1840, the Great Western Railroad instituted “railway time”. Other railroads soon followed. Some towns resisted bringing their public clocks into line with the railroad,***** but by 1880 all of Great Britain was using the same time standard, assuming everyone remembered to wind their watches.
The problems were bigger in the United States, where the distances involved and the potential time variations were greater and rugged individualism was the national pastime. By 1840, America had more miles of track than Great Britain. By 1860, it had more railroad track than the rest of the world combined--and was laying more. For the first time it was important for someone in Pittsburgh to know the exact time in Poughkeepsie, Peoria, and Pacific City. If local time differed too much from place to place, people missed trains, trains missed switches, produce rotted. At first, time was regulated on a railroad by railroad basis. Busy stations had to have a different clock for each railroad. It was confusing, It was messy. And it was dangerous.
In 1883, North American railroad officers finally adopted a plan for Standard Time, creating four zones in the United States and one in eastern Canada, based on mean sun times at set meridians from Greenwich, England. (Western Canada was apparently left to fend for itself in terms of time.) Despite some local opposition--the Indianapolis Sentinel complained that people would have to “eat,sleep, work…and marry by railroad time”(see *****)-- Standard Time became the norm. The Standard Time Act of 1918 belatedly sanctioned existing practice. (I must admit, I wonder what problem required its passage. Was there a town somewhere that simply refused to reset its clocks?)
"Making the trains run on time" remains a synonym for efficiency, Amtrak not withstanding.
*David Crane’s Went The Day Well, one of a flood of new books on the subject because the bicentennial of the battle is nigh.
**Think the start of a Christian church service or the Muslim call to prayer. Both of which were publicly and loudly announced in the pre-modern world--church steeples and minarets served much the same function.
***At some gut level, we still run on sun time. Who doesn’t remember feeling outraged at the unfairness of being sent to bed while it was still light out on a summer evening? And don’t get me started on Daylight Savings Time.
****Not a given, as we’ve discussed before.
*****Someone is always ready to fight for the status quo, even if it means missing the train.
Image courtesy of ingfbruno, via Wikamedia Commons
History on Display: Project 1915
Armenia (Hayasdan)
A smaller version, which will enable you to see the whole thing, but less detail.
On April 24, 2015, Armenians around the world will commemorate the centennial of the Armenian genocide, generally considered the first large-scale genocide of the 20th century. Many of the remembrances will focus on the horror of the genocide itself. In Project 1915, Chicago-based Armenian-American artist Jackie Kazarian chooses instead to celebrate 3000 years of Armenian culture and resilience.
When Kazarian first considered creating a piece of art to commemorate the genocide, she immediately thought about Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s anguished response to another act of horror in the twentieth century--the first saturation bombing of a civilian population as an act of terror in 1936. The painting that stands at the heart of Project 1915, Armenia (Hayasdan), references that initial inspiration with its monumental size and Kazarian’s skillful use of symbolic elements.* Nonetheless the two works are fundamentally different. In Geurnica, Picasso uses fragmentation, dislocation, metamorphosis and a bleak monochromatic palette to create a searing image of the agony of war. In Armenia, Kazarian combines a semi-abstract landscape, a Pollack-like manipulation of wet paint, Armenian cultural imagery, and the glowing palette of a medieval manuscript to imbue Armenia’s tumultuous history with a sense of both loss and joy.
Kazarian describes the work as an “ascension painting”, a phrase that describes not only the chromatic movement in the painting but the emotional movement that it embodies. As the granddaughter of four genocide survivors , Kazarian witnessed and shared their pain, sadness and anger over what they had experienced--emotions shared by the Armenian community as a whole. She hopes the painting will help foster conversation about genocide, tolerance, and forgiveness: “The painting is a gesture of remembrance for the victims and survivors, but it is also meant to inspire conversation about how to promote understanding, compassion and tolerance amongst different communities of people.”
Armenia (Hayasdan) will be displayed in Chicago from April 17 through May 29 at Mana Contemporary. If you’re in Chicago, or coming through, take the time to see it. It is a breathtaking and thought-provoking work of art. If Chicago isn’t in the cards for you, with any luck you’ll have other chances to see the painting. Project 1915 is a non-profit and is currently raising funds to tour the exhibition to other locations throughout the United States and the world.
For more information about the painting and Project 1915, check the website: http://www.project1915.org/.
*The only explicit echo seems to be a ox-like creature from a medieval Armenia manuscript that occupies the same position on the canvas as Picasso’s menacing human-headed bull. On the other hand, both paintings are so rich that I could have missed something.
On The Shores of Tripoli
Decatur boarding the Tripolitan gunboat during the bombardment of Tripoli, 1804. by Dennis Malone Carter
In my seventh grade music class, we regularly sang the anthems of the various branches of the United States’ armed services.* Three days a week, the caissons rolled, bones sank to Davy Jones, planes sailed into the wild blue yonder, and the Marines fought from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. It was years later before I realized that the “shores of Tripoli” referred to the United States’ first foreign war: an odd combination of pirates (err, privateers), naval battles, a new nation flexing its political muscles, and the man on the spot taking matters into his own hands. **
The Barbary corsairs were privateers who dominated the Mediterranean and North Atlantic under the auspices of the Barbary states of North Africa from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. The corsairs raided ships and coastal towns. They not only seized treasure, they took captives, who were held for ransom or sold into slavery. European powers paid tribute [e.g. bribes] to the Barbary states to ensure that their merchant vessels were allowed to sail the Mediterranean without interference.*** The Barbary states regularly complained about the quality of the tribute goods they received, broke treaties with other powers, and negotiated new treaties with higher rates of tribute.
The end of the American Revolution brought a new player into the Mediterranean. Britain had prohibited its North American colonies from trading directly with other countries. The newly formed United States was eager to gain free access to Mediterranean ports. From the perspective of the Barbary states, the United States was a new opportunity for extortion. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Moroccan sultan was the first foreign ruler to recognize American independence. )
The United States authorized negotiations with the Barbary states within months of becoming an independent country and signed agreements with Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis between 1786 and 1797. The relationships were difficult from the beginning: both sides complained of bad faith on the part of the other.
In 1801 the pasha of Tripoli demanded increased amounts of tribute. When Jefferson refused to pay, Tripoli declared war on the United States. For the next few years, the two powers carried out a half-hearted naval war. The United States blockaded and bombarded Tripolitan ports. The pasha’s fleet seized the frigate USS Philadelphia with the intention of demanding ransom money for the crew and adding the ship to the Tripolitan navy. Lieutenant Stephen Decatur earned a reputation as a hero with a daring night time raid in which he sailed the ketch Intrepid into Tripoli harbor, boarded the Philadelphia, set her on fire, and escaped. (Leaving her captain and crew in the hands of the pasha.) In short, the First Barbary War began as a series of skirmishes and raids that hardly deserved the name of war.
In 1805, the war took a weird turn. William Eaton, took a lesson from the British experience in India and decided to become a king maker as a way of resolving the tribute problem. A rival claimant to the Tripolitan throne, older brother of the ruling pasha, was in exile in Egypt. Eaton traveled to Alexandria, where he made a deal with the would-be pasha (without the agreement or authority of the United States government). Using his own money, he raised an expeditionary force that can only be described as motley, cliche or no: sixteen members of the American Navy and Marines,**** forty Greek mercenaries, a squadron of Arab cavalry, and a fleet of camels. Commanded by Eaton, whose military experience was limited to service in the Continental Army as a sergeant and ended in court martial, the force marched more than 500 miles across the Libyan desert--the same territory where Rommel and Montgomery would duke it out in WWII. Food was short and his little army almost mutinied on the way. On April 27, 1805, Eaton and his crew attacked and captured the town of Derna, with the help of three American ships stationed in the Berna harbor.
After the battle, Eaton requested permission to lead his forces against Tripoli. He was told that peace negotiations were underway and he should sit tight. The final treaty reduced the tribute the United States paid to Tripoli, but did not place Eaton’s candidate on the throne. (The American government also didn’t reimburse the money he had spent on his army.)
Ten years later, the United States was once more at war with one of the Barbary States. The resulting treaty with Algiers outlawed future demands for tribute from the North African power. It was soon followed by similar treaties with Tunis and Tripoli, in theory changing the rules of shipping in the Mediterranean.***** Not bad for a new country with a tiny navy.
* Did this happen in other schools? Because in retrospect it seems very odd. It was 1970. I’m sure some of my classmates had older brothers, cousins and/or fathers stationed in Vietnam. War protests were every where: even on the college campuses of our small Ozark city, where the counterculture was relatively thin on the ground. On the other hand, we also sang plenty of songs that were part of the folk revival of the time.
**The “halls of Montezuma” will have to wait for another blog post. One stupid war at a time.
***It is only fair to point out that those same powers, including the United States, also licensed privateers to attack foreign shipping in times of war, which was often loosely defined. And they actively traded in African slaves. Despite eighteenth century hysteria on the subject, enslaving Europeans was not worse than enslaving Africans.
****Hence “the shores of Tripoli”.
*****In fact, Algeria continued to attack European ships in the Mediterranean until the French invasion of 1830.