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Write an essay that reviews the following two online articles:
Paragraph 1 reviews article 1 (identify main points and argument)
Paragraph 2 reviews article 2 (identify main points and argument)
Paragraph 3 reflects on the lessons that you got from both articles.

The Industrial Revolution and Time

Alun C Davies explains how developments in timekeeping and the way people viewed time
played an important part in making the industrial revolution possible.
Before the middle of the eighteenth century - the beginning of the Industrial Revolution perceptions of time were generally hazy, (except perhaps for a handful of scientists). The means
by which the passage of time were measured were rough and ready.
A stick in the ground or any conspicuous landmark cast shadows whose lengths varied as the
day proceeded. Sundials were a sophisticated version, though cloud cover rendered them useless.
Indoors, candles helped, with burnout times approximated.
Better still were hour-glasses, like giant egg timers, standard items for pulpits and navigators.
Those with mechanical skills, in ancient Greece and in medieval Europe, puzzled over the
construction of time-measuring devices whose motive power derived either from an unwinding
spring or falling weights and whose escapements might be regulated in some way.
From the late seventeenth century the accuracy of the mechanisms gradually improved,
especially to the benefit of astronomers and other scientists.
But for most people in an overwhelmingly agricultural economy the natural rhythms of the days
and the seasons sufficed. Time was local.
The tolling of church bells to call parishioners to worship or funerals, or to mark occasional
calamities or celebrations, occurred at times determined by sun dials.
These were calibrated to the astronomical readings of an enthusiastic squire or vicar. Outside the
great observatories, such as Greenwich, the first long-case clocks possessed only one hand to
give a rough idea of the time before or after an approximate hour. Greater accuracy than twenty
minutes a day was difficult to achieve.

The Industrial Revolution changed all that, in two essential ways. The first transformation
occurred in how the passage of time was perceived.
People began to behave and organise themselves in a new way. Second, and equally important,
there was a revolution in the way in which clocks and watches were made. Ironically, although
Great Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution it was the first industrial nation as
one historian famously termed it the new methods of manufacturing timepieces occurred
elsewhere, as the essential features of the Industrial Revolution diffused beyond these islands.
The series What The Industrial Revolution Did for Us directly and indirectly touches on changes
in the use and perception of time. We see how Captain Cook pioneered the application of the
newly developed chronometers to carry Greenwich time with him to the other ends of the earth.
This enabled him to determine longitude more easily and accurately than before, and to attain
remarkable precision in his charts and maps, (with an exactness barely improved before
satellites).
The revolution in ocean navigation proved of incalculable benefit to Britains commercial
prosperity and national security, as the merchant marine and the Royal Navy became equipped
with the equivalents of todays computers.
The Clerkenwell district of London, location of Britains most skilled horological craftsmen,
became the Silicon Valley of the era.
But there is one crucial irony. Its products beautiful clocks, exquisite watches, and prodigiously
accurate chronometers were handcrafted empiricisms, not the standardised products of a
factory. Mass produced timekeepers came later, and not in the country that pioneered factory
production, but the United States.
A mention of factory production reminds us of one of its pioneers, Thomas Arkwright. The
factories of Arkwright and others involved not only housing large new machines but also
applying new kinds of business organisation.
Co-ordination was essential to bring together supplies of raw materials, to organise workers and
distribute their output. No point in having workers turn up at any old time, hoping that someone
had brought in the cotton or wool to be processed, or hoping that someone had cleared
yesterdays output.
Factories demanded considerable time-management. Workers had to be woken by knockers-up;
shifts needed to be measured by a factory clock.
As the industrial economy and its transportation network became more and more complex, bulky
raw materials and finished products needed synchronised services from canal companies, mail
coaches and, later, railways.

For railway passengers, especially, the use everywhere of local time (calculated when the sun
was overhead at noon) spelled confusion.
Agreed timetables were essential, as was a standard time. Railways ultimately imposed
Greenwich Time across Great Britain.
What about the effect the Industrial Revolution had on the methods of producing clocks and
watches? London and the provincial cities were lucrative luxury markets for the products of
skilled craftsmen.
But because of a gradual improvement in incomes as a result of the industrial and agricultural
revolutions, the market for timepieces was widening.
From the middle eighteenth century the impact of the application of the pendulum and other
technical improvements to clocks enabled rural craftsmen, often part-time clockmaker-farmers,
to manufacture cheap long case clocks that were respectably accurate.
More precisely, they assembled and finished the small clock components made in Birminghams
new toy factories after the 1770s. Their cottage grandfather clocks were relatively simple
mechanisms in bulky clock cases; they needed winding daily but they cost only a few pounds.
They were among the first consumer-durables bought at the bottom end of the market. When
any group of workers passed into a phase of improving living standards, observed the late E. P.
Thompson, the acquisition of timepieces was one of the first things noted by observers.
So, small farmers and artisans acquired thirty-hour pull-wind clocks for their cottages. And in the
new industrial towns some of the skilled, better-paid, workers acquired their own personal status
symbols: cheap, bulky (turnip-sized) pocket watches.
The parts were made and sometimes assembled in Liverpool and Coventry and, increasingly,
Switzerland. They were not invariably accurate or reliable, but they created a demand for a better
watch next time.
However, neither Switzerland, Great Britain, nor any place else in Europe, developed the
quintessential features of factory mass production standardised, interchangeable parts and
applied them successfully to the production of cheap timepieces.
It was in New England, between about 1816 and 1837, that Eli Terry redesigned and simplified
clock movements to enable large quantities to be constructed and assembled. Initially they were
made almost entirely of wood and then, after 1837, of cheap brass.
The clocks were easy to set up, and could be placed anywhere, on a table, mantel, or wall. They
sold for as little as $10 in 1810, and soon after for much much less. They sold by the hundreds of
thousands, in the United States and Europe.

Factory production of watches proved more difficult. Their tolerances were finer. But the stream
of technological innovations that shaped the design and production of Yankee clocks led,
eventually, to the millions of watches annually produced by the great firms of Waltham, Elgin,
Hamilton and Waterbury.
The latters price prompted the immortal advertising slogan The watch that made the dollar
famous. The Industrial Revolution had not only changed our attitude and responses to time. It
also revolutionised the way timepieces were produced.
Henceforth, there was a clock for every mantelpiece, and a watch for every person.

German Punctuality Imposing an Artificial

Beat on Life
It is still hard to imagine life in Central Europe functioning properly without punctuality, yet the
dictates of the clock are really nothing but a hangover from the industrialization era and are
pretty much on the way out as far as modern time researchers are concerned.
Two people want to get together, so they arrange to meet at a particular time. Say 2 pm. Person A
arrives five minutes ahead of the agreed time, orders a coffee and leafs idly through a magazine.
At 2.15, person B, slightly out of breath, arrives at the table where person A is already
comfortably ensconced. B apologizes for being late, saying that he received an important phone
call just before leaving. Both smile, everything is alright.
If you are from Central Europe or Germany, it is highly probable that you will regard this
scenario as being entirely natural. People arrange to meet at a specific time, do their best to be
punctual and apologize if they are late.

The invention of punctuality

In reality, however, just about everything about this situation is a highly-complex cultural
construct. Almost nothing about the way in which people arrange to meet is natural, and almost
everything is learnt behaviour especially what we know as punctuality.
Punctual behaviour goes against the natural human sense of time, says Karlheinz Geiler, an
emeritus professor of business and economics education and one of the most frequently-cited
German experts in the cultural history of time perception. Human beings are not born
punctually, do not die punctually, but have to be made punctual. Punctuality, explains Geiler, is

essentially a nineteenth-century invention: it was not until the age of industrialization that the
mass production of mechanical clocks allowed specific times to be generally pinpointed, thereby
giving the observance of the time of day increasing social relevance.
Living ones life by the clock became a virtue and punctuality became one of the most important
characteristics of new, modern men and women. The new man and woman were to be
objectified, quantified, and redefined in clockwork and mechanistic language. Above all, their
life and their time would be made to conform to the regimen of the clock, the prerequisites of the
schedule, and the dictates of efficiency, writes American sociologist Jeremy Rifkin in his classic
work Time Wars. The Primary Conflict in Human History. Before the clock was invented, it was
virtually impossible to precisely time-coordinate human activities, yet industrialization made this
absolutely essential. Punctuality became a large-scale educational mandate for the emerging
industrial society.

De-programming society
It is still thought that this worked particularly well in Central Europe, and especially in Germany.
The huge differences in the way other cultures coordinate their time and their lives illustrate just
how very artificial the so frequently cited German punctuality actually is, however. A person
arranging to meet someone in a culture with which they are not familiar often has to relearn their
approach to punctuality: when might one expect the other person to turn up, if at all? How much
significance should be attributed to a late arrival? What sort of apology can be expected and is
considered acceptable? Is it perhaps even impolite to arrive punctually at the agreed time?
And even in our apparently so consistent Central European understanding of punctuality there
are discrepancies: while it was long the case in the Central European culture that it was hard to
imagine a person being reliable if he or she was not punctual, this is now most certainly the case.
We can be reliable despite being unpunctual by making a phone call, says Karlheinz Geiler.
Fewer and fewer people are living their lives by the clock in other areas, too. Television on
demand will become the norm, newspaper articles can be read online at any time, and radio
programmes listened to later in the form of podcasts. We are de-programming our society,
predicts time researcher Karlheinz Geiler.

Rhythm rather than beat

It almost appears to some extent as if we were gradually achieving something that countless
books have been advising us to do for years: namely to slow down and defy the dictates of the
clock which impose an artificial beat on our lives. We need to replace this beat by definition a
fixed, unyielding repetition once again with rhythm, that is to say repetition with flexibility.
As a matter of fact, it is indeed rhythm that gives time structure to all living things. Biologists
have discovered that a clock ticks in every cell, the biological clock of the circadian rhythm
that governs our entire existence. It determines when we wake up, when we grow tired, and the
cycle according to which our organs function. These body clocks control our physiology,
behaviour and experience. All these internal clocks are synchronized via the light from the sun,

oscillating in unison to bring us through the day and the night, explains Freiburg-based time
researcher and psychologist Marc Wittmann. We cannot directly perceive our biological clock,
but we can and should take the signals our bodies give us more seriously: when am I at peak
performance? When would it be better to take a break?
Nowadays, we have a great opportunity to live more according to our own natural rhythm again
rather than according to the clock, says time researcher Geiler. In any case, even so-called
German punctuality is increasingly becoming a clich which, if at all, only scratches the surface
of reality. If we really think about it, the punctuality of the Germans is actually merely an effect
of the intricacy of their time organization, believes Geiler. But that doesnt necessarily mean
that we always manage to be punctual as a result.