Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Architecture
First Advisor
Plattus, Alan
Abstract
The following dissertation is a project of infrastructure history. This project chiefly focuses on human-constructed time and boredom in the Western world. The Western world has worked collectively to control time for thousands of years. In the pre-modern era, time was primarily monitored using the Sun’s path across the sky. In that period, evidence demonstrates that time was a passive regulator known primarily through the movement of celestial bodies. The orbit of the Moon around the Earth generated the month, which could be measured in multiple ways. Months aided in counting the periods for the seasons and for the harvest. The Earth created two different patterns: the day and the year. The planetary rotation around its central axis accounted for the familiar periods of light and dark that set the rhythm for daily life. The revolution around the Sun and the tilt of the planet relative to the plane of its orbit generated for the year and the seasonal changes more easily counted by months. As technological advancements allowed for a more accurate understanding of each of the periods generated by these bodies, the ability to calculate mean solar time for the year resulted in an average hour, the one known today. In the Middle Ages, mechanical clocks were introduced to the West, which allowed, by mechanism, for evenly spaced hours to be counted both day and night. Through natural curiosity and brute force, these clocks were refined to maintain even minutes as well. Due to the Industrial Revolution, mechanical systems gradually progressed into engines that could move cargo and humans. When the steam engine was condensed to the size of a chassis, the locomotive was born. This revolutionized both transportation and time.As the railway network grew across Europe and North America, chaos ensued as a result of the imperfect reckoning of pre-modern time habits. It was unknown at the time of development, but the ‘machine ensemble’ needed precision. Tireless efforts to further the interests of science and engineering revealed that progress itself required accuracy and uniformity. The scientific revolution pushed to coordinate time across nations to improve the standards of measurement that were necessary to progress. Standardization of weights, measures, and coinage revealed that systemization was a powerful tool for the simplification of life. Among many, Albert Myer, Cleveland Abbe, William F. Allen, and Sandford Fleming pushed the world to adopt Standard Time. A plethora of scientific conferences met to discuss the prospect of an organized schedule of time; however, they were powerless to enforce their ideas. In the fall of 1884, government officials held an international conference for the first time to face the problem of the regulation of time and longitude. Forty-one delegates met in Washington, DC, to approve a set of resolutions that would encourage governmental cooperation on an international scale. The universal day was born. Though Standard Time was slowly adopted after that, early examples were given by England, Sweden, and North America that the population would not quarrel with a move away from solar time. In the years that followed, however, the perpetual motion machine of the Global Chronometer produced side effects that could not have been foreseen. This dissertation argues that one of the most prominent and insidious results is a society structured by the machines of Modernity and an epidemic of boredom. Infrastructure has so carefully formulated Western culture that what was once a harmless datum has become a tyrant of attention in a world devoid of meaning.
Recommended Citation
Michielli, Zachariah, "Making Time: Boredom and the Infrastructure of Modernity" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1325.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1325
