Counterclockwise

I want to try a thought experiment. What if the mechanical (weight- or spring-driven) clock had not been invented, or had failed to gain acceptance? This is known as a counterfactual (or a what-if), as it runs contrary to events. Exercises of this sort are useful for getting a better grasp on the real consequences of an event, or in this case, a technology.

So let us suppose that, at the end of the thirteenth century, the mechanical clock was unknown and was not subsequently invented. This does not mean that there were no timekeeping devices, or that there were no geared devices of any sort. There were sundials and water clocks (clepsydras), as there had been since ancient times. There were time candles, known at least as far back as the ninth century. There may or may not have been sandglasses. One of the curious things about the history of timekeeping is that mechanical clocks and sandglasses appear in the record at about the same time. For short timings, the sorts of things we might use an egg timer for today, Europeans would recite a given number of Paternosters (Lord's Prayers).

Of these methods, the sandglass and the time candle were the only ones to keep constant time with equal minutes or hours. Both were used more for timing than for telling time, though sandglasses would be used by ships for centuries to time a watch, which normally consisted of eight "glasses" turned every half-hour. Time candles seem to have been rare. They maintained a constant time by the simple expedient of marking them at fixed intervals.

Sundials were incapable of keeping equal hours as they were in fact based on the unequal hours of the sun itself. Clepsydras could be geared to work with an escapement, like a mechanical clock in fact, and so could be made to keep standard hours if desired. The Chinese had in fact created at least one water clock of this sort, but they had not followed up on it. Most water clocks were far simpler, and while they could be made to ring an alarm, like a mechanical clock, they were based on how much water would flow through an opening in a given time, thus moving a float. They were not given to unequal hours in the same way as a sundial, but they were unequal due to temperature fluctuations that affected the flow of water, particularly in winter.

It seems unlikely that equal hours would have caught on, or would have taken much longer to catch on, without the mechanical clock. Conceivably some form of clepsydra, like the one known Chinese example, might have been used for monastic or town clocks, but it would have been awkward in a bell tower and useless in much of northern Europe. Without equal hours, time would have continued to move according to the natural rhythms of the sun and the seasons. Work routines would not have been disrupted in the 1380s and after.

Quite possibly the idea of standardized measurements would have been weakened. I may be mistaken, but standard hours were the first measurement to have been constant over a long period across most of Europe. There were no time zones, so the actual time varied from place to place, according to when noon occurred, but the length of an hour became fixed long before other international measurements.

The sciences would have progressed more slowly, or followed a different path. As the accuracy of mechanical clocks increased, fine timing became vital both to astronomy and experimental science. By the end of the seventeenth century, seconds had become critical and for a few experiments, very accurate clocks that measured one one-thousandth of a minute were in use. If the examples of standardized minutes had not been available, would other kinds of standardized measurements have been postponed as well? Would scientists today still be making mistakes in converting English, French, and German inches, feet, and pounds back and forth?

The implications of not having equal seconds, hours, and minutes do not end there. No digital electronic device, and many analog ones, including televisions, would work. Telecommunications as we know it could not exist. Railway and flight schedules would be a nightmare, as varying lengths of hours at different longitudes and a lack of uniform time zones would mean that timetables would have to be recalculated constantly for a myriad of departure locations and destinations. Of course navigation would be just as hard, for while it is possible to go north or south without knowing the time, all east-west travel (moving from one longitude to another) requires knowing the time as precisely as possible. A few minutes error can be catastrophic, as Sir Cloudesley Shovell and his men discovered when their ships were lost due to the inability of the navigators to correctly calculate the longitude in 1707. They found themselves in the Scilly Isles, rather than off the coast of Brittany, in a storm. Only after chronometers were introduced was this sort of thing avoidable. Sailing ships only travelled at a few miles per hour. Imagine the navigational errors in a jet flying a hundred times as fast.

We would simply not have the modern world in any recognizable form without mechanical clocks. They are one of those central inventions that not only had a direct effect on civilization, but had a tremendous knock-on effect (like a cue-ball sending billiard balls in several directions) as well. I have only scratched the surface of the possibilities here, and barely mentioned the cognitive effects, which might have been even more profound.

Mediated Senses

This morning, I saw an "Infographics Feature" from the MIT Technology Review with the portentous title, "The Mobile Device Is Becoming Humankind's Primary Tool." One of the graphs shows that there will soon be almost as many cell phones and mobile devices in the world as there are people. It then goes on to illustrate what surveys show about how those devices are used.

Also, a friend, in response to yesterday's post on "Horses and Biplanes" sent me a piece about railroads and the introduction of time zones from Wired, "Nov. 18, 1883: Railroad Time Goes Coast to Coast." He was struck by how difficult it was to get everyone's time synchronized and the scale of problems this caused.

Those two pieces do not have much to do with each other superficially, but they do share a link. The MIT feature is about how smartphones and other mobile devices are coming to mediate our interactions with reality. The Wired piece is about a juncture when technology greatly increased its role in mediating one of our senses - time. Likewise, "Horses and Biplanes" ended by observing that our digitally mediated environment might be affecting our ability to understand the embodied past. It might make it easier to understand it in an abstract way, but at the same time it makes it harder for us to identify with the physical and sensory experiences of our ancestors.

Clocks in the fourteenth century were the first complex machines to mediate between one of our senses and the world. Earlier, language, writing, art, and calendars had all played roles in mediating reality, but with the invention of mechanical time keeping, I suspect a fundamental change occurred. Today our sense of time is almost wholly artificial and our trust in instrumentation is nearly complete. (I am reminded of those stories of people who have driven their cars into creeks and ponds because their GPS system told them that there was a road or bridge that did not exist.) That would have been essentially inconceivable in the 1380s, but one of the effects of clocks on history, it seems to me, is that it made us more amenable to trusting devices more than our senses.

Of Horses and Biplanes

In the early years of the last century, men and women were confronted by many different kinds of machinery for the first time. Aircraft were a tremendous unknown, but pilots quickly learned to adapt. Even though they were flying hundreds and thousands of feet in the air, and had to learn to think and act in three dimensions, one is struck by the extent that attitudes towards the horse seem to have carried over into early aviation. It is notable that large numbers of the aces of the First World War were former cavalrymen, so this is perhaps to be expected, but it is driven home forcefully by the memoir, The Red Battle Flyer, of the Red Baron, Freiherr Manfred von Richtofen.

The early pages are filled with Richtofen's exploits steeple chasing with various horses prior to the War. He wrote of his horses and his planes in much the same way, sometimes giving the machine almost animate qualities, such as this passage:

I was surrounded by an inky blackness. Beneath me the trees bent down in the gale. Suddenly I saw right in front of me a wooded height. I could not avoid it. My Albatros managed to take it. I was able to fly only in a straight line. Therefore I had to take every obstacle that I encountered. My flight became a jumping competition purely and simply.  [Emphasis added.]

 The metaphors he uses throughout the book are all of the chase and the hunt. One feels that he and his contemporaries created a relationship with their machines similar to the ones that they had previously had with their horses. (It is striking to note, that one of the arguments against the introduction of enclosed cockpits in the thirties was that the pilots could not clearly hear the engines; they were using all of their senses, literally flying by the seat of their pants.)

We seem always to have treated our machines, at least the complex ones, as if they are alive. While we may logically know they are not alive, the intuitive and imaginative portions of the mind do treat them as if they are. Sailing ships were virtually living machines, and were certainly treated as such by their crews. Like early aircraft, they had to be operated by feel, sight, and sound. In a sense, they spoke to the whole person. This is something we are losing today as we come to rely more and more on sight in operating our digital machines.

In a previous post, I suggested that clocks created a different understanding of time, one actually rooted in the structure of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. We cannot fully recover the sense of time our pre-fourteenth century ancestors had. I am also suggesting that as we move away from the analog feedback that machines have given us in the past, and replace them with digital readouts and displays, even if they mimic the old dials and gauges, we are less-and-less able to experience machines in the way our predecessors did, even a century ago. In dealing with the past, we need to keep this in mind.

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The quote is taken from Manfred von Richtofen, The Red Battle Flyer, trans. J. Ellis Barker, 1918, p. 94.

A Change of Direction

It must seem that I am departing a long way from the original emphasis of this blog in looking at military history, and particularly at battles. Of course it is, but that is my prerogative. The truth is that I love military history and have previously written about how battles were narrated and depicted, and to some extent about what that could tell us about the mental processes of those who wrote or drew or painted them. In point of fact, it is the mental processes that hold my attention, even if the drums and trumpets, the colorful uniforms, the complexity of the flow of events distracts me now and again.

But there is something else I want to point out, something that while it does simply represent my point of view, is, to me, a very important point. Any kind of history, any specialty, whether by subject, nation, region, or time period is just a piece of universal history. Universal history has gone out of fashion in the past century, but properly understood as a holistic picture of the world, one that has no proper bounds other than the nature of humanity; it must be the ending point of all historical endeavors. Maybe that sounds romantic or simply crazy to you. This is really my starting point, whether I am writing about the battle of Mobile Bay, the cognitive effects of clocks, the workings of Machiavelli's imagination (I inevitably end up coming back to Machiavelli like a lodestone), Tolkein's hatred of machinery, the significance of soldiers crying in a folk song, or the Red Baron's relationship to his airplanes. I was mistaken in trying to make this a blog about one aspect of history, for neither history nor my mind works that way. In the end, what matters is what these subjects can tell us about the spirit of a time, the nature of humanity, and our relationship with the world.

As always, I am feeling my way toward something that I may never reach. I suppose that could be taken as history as a form of mysticism, which, is, perhaps, not far from how I really view history. Sometimes I may sound pompous, even to my self. Oftentimes I may make statements that are maddeningly vague and which I cannot completely prove (and may later repudiate).

Everything in history is a clue to who we are and may become.

Clocks and the Brain

We know that time perceptions changed with the coming of the clock but were not instantaneous. Rather they were a slow, even glacial series of revolutions, as Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift would have it (Glennie and Thrift, 162). Nevertheless, there were significant changes underway by 1400 and which were fully elaborated by 1500. These, if I understand the neuropsychology summarized by Iain McGilchrist correctly, should have already begun to have an effect on brain organization (McGilchrist, 74-77). They may have applied more to the elites and certain professions (sailors and merchants, for instance) but appear to have been widespread.

To begin with, we need to recognize different kinds of time. There is natural, experiential time through which we maintain a continuous, narrative flow of sensations in context. This is strongly associated with the right hemisphere of the brain. Damage to the right posterior cortex can cause a loss of this continuous time and impair the ability to understand narratives. McGilchrist likens this to Capgras Syndome, also caused by right hemispheric deficits. In the case of Capgras, the same individual seen at different times in different moods or with a different haircut is perceived as a different person, usually an impostor (McGilchrist, 54). The person affected with Capgras sees only differences and cannot properly connect other people seen in different contexts or times. Individuals with damage to the right posterior cortex, likewise, often cannot connect things that happen at different times or even sequentially.

The second kind of time, time experienced as discrete units (hours, minutes, seconds), is largely the province of the left hemisphere. The more abstract the perception of time, the more the left hemisphere is involved. Glennie and Thrift go so far as to argue there are many different kinds of clock time, depending on factors such as how important it is to know the precise time and how easily it is to get the correct time. These would still all be left-hemispheric functions, I believe, and greater precision should be generally related to greater abstraction. Likewise, linear time appears to be a more abstract experience than cyclical time. It arises as a major point of view only in a few societies, and it primarily associated with the monotheistic religions of the Middle East and Europe.

Prior to 1300, time for most people was cyclical and continuous (Berman, 306, notes 7 & 9). Linear time was part of Christianity, but was primarily of interest to clerics. Even the yearly cycle of saint's days and feasts, drawn from the linear history of Christianity, would have reinforced the cycle of the seasons.

In the thirteenth century, before the spread of clocks, civil statutes and other documents expressed time in terms of the sun and the canonical hours (such as Prime, Terce, Sext, and None, which varied in length according to the season) that were rung on church bells. By the early fourteenth century, at Bristol, regulations of the port, market, and trade were using the standardized (unvarying) hours struck by a clock (Glennie and Thrift, 172). By the end of the century, artisans were also denoting time in this way in depositions. Less than a century later, clock time was common in correspondence (173) and it was not uncommon to record important events down to the quarter of an hour (181 & n. 60).

So what can we make of all this. Obviously men and women did not suddenly lose their sense of continuous, narrative time. Over the course of these two centuries, and the two that followed (when minutes and seconds first became important, they were gradually developing that portion of the left brain associated with abstract time and abstract analysis to a greater degree than in the past. I believe this happened across the board, from peasants to kings. This goes along with many other aspects of the Renaissance information revolution, although other aspects of it ran in the contrary direction. Because human perception of time is so central to understanding the world, it is critical to our ability to comprehend the minds and perceptions of our ancestors. We cannot build up a nuance portrait without this kind of knowledge.

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Sources:

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, "Revolutions in the Times," in David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers, eds., Geography and Revolution. University of Chicago Press, 2005, 161-198.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, 2009.

Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World. Cornell University Press, 1981.

Clock Time

Clocks are one of those things that affect a great many others. In the case of clocks, it is because they affect one of our fundamental perceptions: time. But in the beginning, I think they had a second effect, changing, or perhaps sharpening, our common understanding of cause and effect. For a period of about five hundred years the clock was the most complex device in existence, certainly the most complex one most people would ever encounter. It was also understandable. One could look at the clockworks, big or small, and have their arcane processes explained. One thing followed logically after another. Effect followed cause; all was visible, orderly, and explicable. Is it any wonder that it would become a model for the universe and the divine order?

For the small percentage of humanity living in European towns, clock time came to replace nature as the timekeeper from the 1380s onward. No longer did hours vary in length with the seasons. They were uniform; urban workers were now expected to work the same length of time each day regardless of the month or the changing length of daylight.

Humankind was learning to live to an artificial rhythm, one at odds with the world around them but also with their own circadian rhythms. One wonders if they did not also become more irritable. People also became more used to breaking things up into units, into atomizing their experiences.

New geographies of time emerged. This was not immediate, and for the first century or two was communal, private citizens could rarely afford clocks, and watches were unknown before 1500. But clocks became smaller and more accurate, slowly making their way into homes, first of nobles, then of the bourgeoisie.  The minute, the hour, and the day were mapped not on the sun and the moon, but on the clock. As clocks increased in accuracy, minutes began to matter.

These changes coincided with the emergence of humanist notions of historical time and time periods. Religion and mythology had long constructed chronologies with different ages in them, but these were not historical time periods. Typically, all of history was one and continuous. The Renaissance began to see that there were discontinuities and that the ancient world and the modern world were not one seamless whole. Through the work of men like Bruni, the differences came to be understood and appreciated.

So it was not only the daily sense of time that was being altered in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It seems to me that the entire human sense of time was changing radically in those years. Likewise, I would argue that both clocks and the new understanding of history were creating a broader command of causality, one that would come to rely less-and-less on divine intervention. These were important changes in the mental processes of Renaissance Europeans.

Rapid Change Is Nothing New

We tend to think of the rapid change of our times as somehow both the norm and unique at the same time. We want our time to be special, so we too often fail to understand the extent or the kinds of changes our ancestors saw, while, at the same time, magnifying every little fad of ours into momentous change. The truth is that there were changes going on in Europe five, six, and seven hundred years ago that were cognitively as wrenching as anything we have experienced.

I've mentioned humanism in the preceding posts. It introduced a new educational agenda, along with new ways of looking at language, history, politics, and authority. Meanwhile, in England and Bohemia, serious religious upheavals were underway, leading to religious wars that lasted fifteen years in Bohemia, and occasionally spilling out into neighboring lands. But of course all of Europe was wracked by wars, and when not by wars, often by marauding bands of ex-soldiers. The Plague had thinned the population and altered social and economic relationships all over the continent.

If the humanists were mainly interested in the word, the artists of the time were evincing a new interest in the eye. The development of linear perspective was critical in the rise of the sciences and engineering in Europe. It taught a new way to observe the present, just as humanist textual analysis taught new ways to see the past.

There were so many new technologies contributing too. If, when Leonardo Bruni wrote his De Militia in 1422, printing was not yet a reality, he was a beneficiary of cheap paper and eyeglasses. His childhood would have included revolts and labor unrest that included riots by workers being forced to work according to the new concepts about time resulting from the spread of clocks. Metallurgy was also on the move among Europeans in the wake of the blast furnace and the trip hammer, though these had been in existence for some time. We can see this in the development of armor between 1300 and 1500, moving from chainmail with smaller pieces of steel plate armor, to full suits of plate, culminating in the magnificently worked suits that we admire in museums today, and in which we anachronistically dress the Knights of the Round Table.

One of the reasons, particularly after 1400, for improvements in armor was the introduction of guns to Europe by the 1320s. These, as well as the powder they used, underwent continual improvements in these years, ultimately wrecking medieval walls with unprecedented speed by the mid-1400s, requiring new types of fortification, and affecting the lives of city dwellers everywhere by fostering new types of city planning (to ensure the most effective fortifications). They also altered the balance of power on more than one occasion, contributing to the endemic warfare and political turmoil of the times.

It is against this backdrop that we must see the people and events of the Renaissance. Life failed to stop moving, nor did the human mind cease to find new directions for development. Likewise the battlefield was in constant flux, with major changes coming with each new war or even each new campaign.