Hitting the Books: In England's industrial mills, even the clocks worked against you
’, poetically described the role of the watch in eighteenth-century Britain as ‘the small instrument which now regulated the rhythms of industrial life’. It’s a description that, as a watchmaker, I particularly enjoy, as I’m often ‘regulating’ the watches I work on — adjusting the active hairspring length to get the watch running at the right rate — so they can regulate us in our daily lives.
Once in the workplace, access to time was often deliberately restricted and could be manipulated by the employer. By removing all visible clocks other than those controlled by the factory, the only person who knew what time the workers had started and how long they’d been going was the factory master. Shaving time off lunch and designated breaks and extending the working day for a few minutes here and there was easily done.
Time was a form of social control. Making people start work at the crack of dawn, or even earlier, was seen as an effective way to prevent working-class misbehavior and help them to become productive members of society. As one industrialist explained, ‘The necessity of early rising would reduce the poor to a necessity of going to Bed bedtime; and thereby prevent the Danger of Midnight revels.’ And getting the poor used to temporal control couldn’t start soon enough.
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