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Understanding 9/11tv Turn and Jump CSPAN September 17, 2017 7:44am-7:52am EDT
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always stay first. i think that first in the nation primary is an integral part of new hampshire's political culture which i would define as first and foremost participatory. >> and after an activist told me one time when i was working on my book that the thing about new hampshire is anybody can play here and that can be candidate but also activist who can get involved in the campaign. >> and have a role that might be well out of proportion to their actual political experience. are there professional campaign here, no question about it but it's still a place where a citizen can take apart and we take pride in that. >> tv is in concord new hampshire. up next we speak with author howard mansfield about his book "turn and jump" which explains how the concept of time zones came about . >> time first meant when the sun was in the sky and knew
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was when the sun is exactly overhead. in your field, your town, your place but time is very local. time is the course of the sun across the sky and it's the course of the moon, it's sees. and what happens is that clients come along. >> clocks represent time, clocks represent nature. plots minutes the passage of time. then by the end of the 19th century, clocks our time and nature is a guide and this happens for a lot of different reasons. industrialization, the railroad he plays a huge role. you're no longer just on the side in your little village. you're taking the train. because now you've gone from one local place to another local place, everybody's got their own place. you might get off and there might be two different clocks on the train and that's when the railroad essentially creates time zones in 1883. if the railroads do it, not the government.
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>> but the other thing to understand about the railroad is in the 19th century the railroad is everything. it is the technology. look to it to get rich, people look to it to unite our bonds and hold this union together, it's going to do god's work, is going to bring progress out to the wilderness, it's going to do everything. the railroad is a tremendously powerful force in that century. in the early days,this is peculiar but there were trains before there were develop telegraph systems . so if there wasn't precisely at that spot a coordinated clock. there's that. getting passages on the trains, getting the train to arrive correctly, safety issues, the trains have to be exactly the right place on the tracks at the right time. first before the time zones it was really confounding to people. this might have one time,
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local people might have another time, there might be another time on the courthouse, it was not standardized and if you're not going from place to place, it doesn't matter but when you are, there's no way for people to communicate. whatever knew is, it's a different time in chicago, from any city in between, it's a different time anyplace because the sun is in a different place. in 1872 there were 72 different time standards so they got to straighten this out. time zones were decided by the railroads having to do with the railroad territory and that's how they come about and that's why they break the way they do, pretty much. it's still close to that way today. so it's the railroads who shaped our idea of time which is appropriate because when people got on trains the first time they were spun
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around and couldn't believe they were moving as fast. and wondered about the consequences of everything being closer together, they thought this was going to change the view of everything in the world. it was quite the technology that turned the world upside down but when the time zones are declared, people have to move their clock sometimes by as much as nine minutes, 18 minutes and throws people off and what's happening again is that a local possession becomes this national thing. then there's great talk in the world about coordinating all clocks with one universal clock so we get the very idea of time changes , progress changes the way we feel time passes. so when the railroads create these time zones, there's a pretty big protest in a lot of places. people say how could you deviate the truth from the sun, how could you mess with god's son? they don't want to be on and they have a referendum and three quarters of augusta maine votes against it.
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at this philadelphia time and there are places in indiana that don't that . so it's a very close idea to people. there's right now in maine and new hampshire and attempts to try to move the states out of eastern time zones to atlantic time zones stay used in newfoundland or nova scotia, thinking that would be better. and even in massachusetts, a daylight wood shop so you can tell this still with people, the more i read about it, more it doesn't make make much sense to me. the idea that you would move from maine and new hampshire out of the eastern time zone and leave messages into the atlantic time zone because it was more corresponding with the rising and setting of the sun goes there's still that lingering disquiet or not comfort with this whole notion so it almost goes back to the 1883 saying how do you impose this time on us?
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one of the key consequences of industrialization and progress is how the relationship time itself has changed. in the book i get an example about continuous volume, it's very interesting. vaudeville starts out as a series of acts, toddlers, musicians or 20 minute acts and there's a, he's a showman, rko, he's a new hampshire boy. eventually we got these vaudeville theaters, one of them in boston, 14 percent of the population went through this one theater. and he's a showman, he's trying to fill a theater all day long. it empties out, it feels, driving you nuts. he says let's run the show continuously, when you are done you can sit there all day if you want which only 20 percent of the audience did but when you sit there, they
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say let's stay but you get people to leave, there would be acts that you turn out as you once but not twice and those acts are called chasers and their purpose is to turn over the theaters so they would spend their whole careers knowing they were going to be singing to seats and walked out but this idea of the continuous is an industrial idea. production is continual, election cycles are continual, we recognize this today so continuous bonneville, that's what it's called, that's a perfect match for urban time, industrial time and different than seasonal time. that's an example of our senses time getting into the way is seen now c-span visited concorde new hampshire to learn more about the city's literary scene. visit the new hampshire state
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