The continuing role of clock time in relation to labor productivity is a theme I will pursue in chapter 4. There is certainly much evidence that the use of clocks to increase the rate of work was even more marked in the early years of the twentieth century, with developments such as scientific management and Taylorism.13 It would later be immortalized in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times, which depicts the alienated factory worker literally fighting the clock to slow down production.
What is undeniable is that by the early twentieth century a new sense of temporal exactitude was developing. Inhabitants of that era would have been conscious of a change in the pace of working and social life; of living in a culture in which accurate timekeeping, eficiency and punctuality were becoming normative.
However, in order to understand how speed enters the modern cultural imagination, we need to move beyond a narrow focus on clocks as talismanic artifacts. Arguably, communication systems like the railway, the telegraph, the telephone, and wireless communications were as significant as increasingly accurate timepieces in leading to novel ways of experiencing both time and human afairs. As we shall see, this new material world paradoxically brought both an optimistic sense of security, of being in control of events, and a sense of insecurity, a sense of a world speeding out of control. And, as Hannah Gay observes, “In the early twentieth century these two sensibilities ran in parallel and played of each other.”14
Machine Speed and Modernity
Much has been written about the massive social and technological changes that took place from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The cultural historian Stephen Kern’s well-known account describes how innovations in art, architecture, literature, science, and technology mutually influenced and inspired each other.15 The achievement of higher speed was integral to those developments and permeated every aspect of society. Speed, in the sense of modern machine velocity, formed a powerful cultural narrative during this period, yoking together machines, money, and progress. The telegraph presaged many of these changes, so altering the structure of social relations that it has been christened the Victorian Internet.16 I will therefore consider this case before turning to look at modernist avant-gardists’ celebration of speed.17
Time and Motion
43