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Understanding 9/11tv Turn and Jump CSPAN September 16, 2017 8:38pm-8:46pm EDT
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them accountable and if they do a great job let's let them open another school and if they do a terrible job let's replace them with a stronger operator. >> watch afterwards tonight at 10:00 eastern on c-span2's booktv. >> more about the literary scene. up next we speak to howard mansfield about his book "turn and jump: how time and place fell apart" that explains how the concept of time zones came about. >> time first meant where the sun was in the sky, noon was when the sun was completely overhead in your town, in your place. time is very local. time is the course of the sun across the sky, the moon, the season. what happened is clocks come along. the first clocks represent time,
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represent nature, the clock face mimics the passage of time and by the end of the 19th century clocks our time and nature is forgotten and this happens for a lot of people. industrialization, the railroad plays a huge role in it. you are no longer on a hillside in your village, you need more accurate time if you are taking the train because you are going from a local place to another and everybody has his own place, you might be off and there are two clocks on the train platform and that is when the railroads create time zones in 1883. the other thing is in the 19th century the railroad was everything. it is the shaping technology. people look to it to get rich, to unite our bonds and hold this union together that will do god's work and bring progress
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out and do everything so the railroad is a tremendously powerful force in the 19th century. in the early days there were trains before there were developed telegraph systems. if it wasn't precisely at that spot accidents happen. so there that, getting passages on the train, getting them to arrive correctly, safety issues, the trains have to be in the same place at the right time. before the time zones it was really confounding to people, the railroad might have one time, local people have another and there might be a different time on the courthouse, the church or the jeweler. it was not standardized and if you're not going place to place it doesn't matter but when you are there is no way for people to communicate. whatever noon is is a different
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time in detroit, chicago, a different time every place. 's the sun is in a different place. 1872 there are 70 time standards used by the railroad so they got to straighten this out, time zones were decided by the railroads, that is how they came about. that is close to that today so railroads shaped their ideas of time which is appropriate is when people got on trains for the first time they were spun around, couldn't believe they were moving this fast, wanted about consequences of being closer together and thought it would change the view of everything in the world, it was quite the technology that turned the world upside down so when time zones were declared people had to move their clocks by 9 minutes, 18 minutes, really throws people off.
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what is happening is time, a local position becomes a national thing. this talk in the world about coordinating all clocks, one universal clock, the idea of time changes. progress changes the way time is passing. when railroads create time zones, a pretty big protest and a lot of places. how could you deviate the truth from the sun, mess with god. in augusta, maine, they don't want to be on philadelphia time. they have a referendum and vote against this philadelphia time. there are places that don't adapt and some don't. it is a close idea to people. there is right now in maine and new hampshire an attempt to move states out of the eastern time zone to the atlantic time zone
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which they use in newfoundland or nova scotia thinking that would be better or massachusetts. you hand tell it is with people. the more i read about it the more it doesn't make sense to me the idea that you would just move maine or new hampshire out of the eastern time zone and massachusetts into the atlantic time zone. it shows there is still that lingering disquiet or not quite comfort with this notion. it is back to 1883, how dare you impose this on us. one of the key consequences of industrialization and progress is our relationship to time itself and that has changed. in the book "turn and jump: how time and place fell apart" i give an example, this is very
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interesting, a series of struggles of musicians, 15 minute acts, this fellow who is a showman, the k and rko, new hampshire boy, he starts these father fill theaters. one of them in boston, 14% of the population went through this one theater. he is trying to fill his theater all day long, fills out and empties out and fills, he said let's run the show continuously. you can set all day if you want. when people come in, this is popular. to get people to leave their will be acts that are good enough to see once but not twice and those are called chasers. their purpose is to turn over the theaters. they spend their careers knowing
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they will see people stand up and walk out. the idea of continuous is an industrial idea. production is conceivable, election cycles are continual, we recognize this today, continuous fraud fill is a perfect match for urban industrial time and seasonal time and that is an example of our sense of time, to entertain ourselves. >> why don't we get started? the program is being recorded by c-span and being live streams, we
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