The perfecting of mechanical clocks in Europe takes place over the five centuries encompassing the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the scientific and industrial revolutions, their bona fides and authority established by the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler (“The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism, but rather to a clockwork”), and by the seventeenth-century natural scientist Isaac Newton, who was also master of Britain’s royal mint (“Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external”). French Jesuit missionaries bringing Christianity into the seventeenth-century North American wilderness taught the Huron to recognize the will of God in the face of “Captain Clock”; so in nineteenth-century Europe, while the universal and uniform time shifted from the biosphere to the technosphere, the Captain’s coercive omnipresence facilitated the transfer of political power from the landed aristocracy and the cloistered clergy to the bourgeois captains of industry and finance.
Lewis H. Lapham
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