>> the book is for sale outside, and i'm going to take jon kukla outside to go sign them. [inaudible conversations] >> booktv's in concord, new hampshire. up next we speak with author howard mansfield about his book, "turn and jump," that explained how the concept of time zones came about. >> time first meant where the sun was in the sky. noon was where the sun is exactly overhead.

time is very local. time is nature. time is the course of the sun across the sky, it's the course of the moon, it's the seasons. and what happens is that clocks come along. first clocks represent time. clocks represent nature. the clock face mimics, you know, the passages. and by the end of the 19th century, clocks are time and nature is forgotten. and this happens for a lot of different reasons, industrialization, the railroads plays a huge role in this. you're no longer just on a little hillside in your little village. you need more accurate time if you're taking the train, because now you're going from one local place to another local place, everybody's got its own place. you might get off, and there'd be two different clocks on the platform. and that's when the railroads actually create time zones, in 1883. it's the railroads do it, not the government, not congress. the other thing to understand

about the railroad is in the 19th century thed are is everything. i mean -- the railroads is everything. i mean, it is the shaping technology. people look to it to get rich, to unite our bands, hold this union together, tig going to do -- it's going to do god's work, bring progress out, it's going to do everything. so the railroad is a tremendously powerful force in the 19th century. and in the early days, this is kind of peculiar, but there were trains before there were really developed telegraph systems. so if it wasn't precisely at that spot with a coordinated clock, accidents happened. so there's that. getting passengers on the trains, getting the trains a arriving -- arriving correctly, safety issues. 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 because the railroad might have one time, the local people might have another time, there might be a different time on the courthouse from the church or

the jeweler. just was not standardized. and if you're not going from place to place, it doesn't matter. but when you are, then there's no way for people to communicate. let's say whatever noon is, it's a different time at that one time in detroit, from chicago, from any little city in between, it's a different time any place because the up sun's really in a different place. and in 1872 there are 70 different time standards being used by the railroads. so they've got to straighten this out. time zones or were decided by the railroads pretty much having to do with the railroads' own territory, and that's how they came about, and that's why they break the way they do pretty much. and it's still pretty close to that today. it's the railroads that shaped our ideas of time which is appropriate because when people got on trains for the first time, they were totally spun around. they couldn't believe they were moving this fast, they 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. so when the time zones are declared, you know, people have to move their clock sometimes by as much as, like, nine minutes, eighteen minuters. it really throws people off. and what's happening, again, is that time -- a local possession -- becomes this national thing. and then there's talk in the world about coordinating all clocks and making one universal clock perhaps. so just the very idea of time changes, progress changes, the idea of time, progress changes the way we feel time is passing. so when these railroads create these time zones in 1883, there's a pretty big protest in a lot of places. people say how could you deviate the truth, how could you mess with god's time. augusta, maine, throws up their arms. they don't want to be on philadelphia time, as they call it, and they have a referendum, and three-quarters of augusta, maine, votes existence accepting this philadelphia time. and there's places in indiana

that don't adapt, and some factories do and some don't. so it's a very close idea to people. there's right now in maine and new hampshire an attempt to try and move the states out of the eastern time zone to the atlantic time zone. have is you heard about this? which they use in, is it newfoundland or nova scotia? thinking that would be better. and even massachusetts looked at this. because the daylight would match up. so you can tell it's still with people. the more i read about it, the more it just doesn't make much sense to me. so the idea that you would just move maine or new hampshire out of the eastern time zone, and even massachusetts, into the atlantic time zone because it was more correspondent with the rising and the setting of the sun shows there's still that lingering disquiet or not quite comfort with this whole notion. so it almost goes right back to the editorials of 1883 saying how dare you impose this foreign time on us.

one of the key consequences of industrialization and progress is our very relationship to time itself. and that has changed. in the book, in "turn and jump," there's an example i give about continuous vaudeville. this is very interesting. vaudeville starts out, it's a series of acts, jugglers, musicians, 15-minute acts, maybe 20 minutes, and there's this fellow, b.f. keith, he's the showman. he's a new hampshire boy. eventually, he starts these vaudeville theaters. at one of them in boston i think 14% of the entire population of boston went through this one theater, conservative estimate. keith is a showman, he's trying to fill his theater all day long. it empties out, it fills, empties out, it fills, driving him nuts. he says let's run the show continuously. you can sit there all day, if you want -- only 2% in the audience did -- but this is popular. people would stay.

but to get people to leave, there'd be acts that are good enough of to see once -- enough to see 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're going to be seeing people stand up, seats close and walk out. but this idea of the continuous is a very industrial idea. production isen continual, election cycles are continual. we recognize this today. so continuous vaudeville -- that's what it's called -- is a perfect match for urban time, for industrial time and very different than seasonal time. and that's an example of our sense of time getting right into the way we entertain ourselves. >> c-span is in the capital city of concord to learn more about its history from local authors. up next, we speak elizabeth