The historian Lewis Mumford names the clock, not the steam engine or the printing press, as “the key machine of the modern industrial age…a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events,” and Taylor’s template for an efficient workplace appeared during the same few decades around the turn of the twentieth century that also vastly extended the powers of machine-made time to levy taxes, amass capital, declare war. The speeding up of time by telegraph and telephone, on radio and film, with fast-moving automobiles, airplanes, and artillery shells depended for its supremacy on Newton’s conception of absolute, true, mathematical time that of its own nature flows without relation to anything external—neither to the laws of gravity nor the nature of human beings.
Lewis H. Lapham
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