Lecture ISHA-Millennium-Seminar
Time and Millennium
Good evening everyone.
My name is Emil Zopfi. I’m a Swiss writer and journalist, 56 years old. When I was at about your age, I studied electronics engineering and later I worked for many years as an engineer and computer specialist. It was a time when computers were still very large and expensive machines and only a few privileged people had access to the computing centres and the new technology. I decided to write about computers as an emerging technology. A new and important factor of modern life. Twenty-two years ago my first novel was published, the story of a night-shift in a computing centre. The title was " Every Minute Costs 33 Francs". I used time as titles, beginning at 10:17 p.m. and ending at 07:07 a.m. It’s a story about time as well as technology and computers.
You are young historians from many European countries, guests of Switzerland which is the land of watches and watchmakers. The homeland of punctual trains and people. Therefore, when Chris Schmidtpeter asked me to give this lecture, I thought it would be appropriate to tell you a bit about time and technology from my point of view. And of course about the millennium-problem, because it’s the topic of this seminar.
We’ll have a question and answer period after my talk. And then, if there is time leftover, I will read a short story about the millennium bug. You see, we live in a completely time-driven and time-dependent world. Therefore I must thank you all for coming and dedicating an hour of your lifetime to me and my words.
As historians you know that the world hasn’t always been time-driven. In the past people were concerned with their basic needs, food, clothing and shelter. And they were governed by the sun, moon and stars, by the darkness and the light. In other words: by the " clock of heaven". A day was the shortest unit of time. After Galileo Galilei proposed using the pendulum in his "discorsi" in 1638 it became possible to divide the day into smaller units, namely the second. The pendulum clock is a man-made time-keeping machine. It’s important to note that time as we know it is measured or produced by machines. This is very different from time in nature.
Our time is a product of the modern, industrialised world. In everyday language we use the expressions: "take time, make time, give time or waste time" as if time was a material good. Sometimes we "kill time". And very often we use the term "time is money" ? especially in Switzerland, which is not only the land of watches but also the land of big money. But unlike money, time is the most democratic good of the world’s commodities. Everyone receives with every second the same amount of time.
For each of us, of course, not each second in our lives has the same meaning. Most of them pass completely unnoticed. Only very few of those seconds are crucial and remain in our memory forever. The time produced by machines and the time we experience as human beings is completely different. Machines produce a continuous stream of counted intervals, while memory is non-linear. You as historians study and write about the collective memory, better known as history, which is non-linear as well. In modern terms: history is a kind of hypertext-structure while time is a continuous linear flow. We could perhaps derive from this observation that a time-driven society is inhuman.
People had exactly this feeling when time measurement was introduced into everyday life, affecting the lives of working people in particular. A few years ago I wrote a historical novel based on the introduction of the clock during the early industrialisation of Switzerland. Maybe you know that during the last century Switzerland as well as England were two of the most industrialised countries in the world. It was in 1837 when in my home-canton ? the valley of Glarus in the eastern part of the country ? that the owners of a big textile-printing factory introduced time measurement into the manufacturing process for the very first time. The novel is entitled "The Factory Bell". A bell was installed in a small tower on the roof of the factory. A signal announced the beginning and the end of each workday. This was done to ensure production efficiency by making absolutely sure that everyone was doing his or her job at exactly the same time. But the workers, consisting of men, women and children, despised the bell and decided to go on strike. It was the first such rebellion in Swiss industrial history and it ended in defeat.
The so-called "Bell strike of Glarus" had a religious aspect as well. Previously, bells and therefore time had belonged to the church. Time had been a religious matter. In 1837 the factory owners claimed time as their right and property. It was a era of change. Maybe you have heard that ten years later, in 1847, the modern Swiss state was founded following a civil war, the "Sonderbundskrieg". The victory went to the liberal forces which had fought against the old conservative catholic power.
Towards the end of the 19th century, time became a crucial factor in the industrialised world. The time-clock and the stop-watch controlled human activity. Henry Ford’s precisely timed conveyor-belt system became the symbol of modern industry ? and an inhuman aspect of industrial capitalism as well. Remember Charley Chaplin’s movie "Modern Times".
During the second half of this century the computer was introduced ? a highly sophisticated time-control and management tool. Joseph Weizenbaum, the famous American computer scientist and writer, draws a direct line from the clock to the computer. In his book "Computer Power and Human Reason" he calls the clock the first "autonomous machine" in history. He writes, that the clock was the only "autonomous machine" before the computer was invented. An "autonomous machine", he notes, "once started, runs by itself on the base of an internalised model of some aspect of the real world". The "autonomous machine" transforms man’s perception of the universe and creates a new reality. It transforms a society driven by basic needs into a time-driven one. And here we are.
Time is a factor of power. With clocks, which include the time-clock, the stop-watch and the computer, power is enacted on us humans. After the successful introduction of the factory bell, workers were punished for coming to work late.
Time also means power in another and perhaps more important way. Historically the primary reason for developing time measuring machines actually had nothing to do with keeping time, but instead with navigation on sea. In order to calculate the position of a ship you need to know the exact time. For England’s powerful fleets as well as for other sea-going nations navigation was the all-important factor. The Observatory of Greenwich was built by King Charles II on a knoll above the docks of London 1675, the place where in 1884 the "Zero-Meridian" was established and the Greenwich Mean Time as a world standard. The Duke of Wellington, the man who defeated Napoleon, supported the mathematician and philosopher Charles Babbage who developed the first programmed calculator. He promised to calculate with his "analytical engine" more precise and error-free navigation tables.
Even now, precise time-measurement and time-keeping is one of the basic elements of power. The most advanced world-wide navigation tool is the Global Positioning System developed and maintained by the US-Army. The GPS is equipped with very precise atomic clocks. A cruise missile, for instance, hits a target better the more precisely the clocks are synchronised in the system’s satellites.
Clock-time is also crucial in computer technology. The faster the clock, the more powerful the processor. And society itself becomes ever faster moving. The faster a company develops new products and new systems, the more chances it has to survive in the global markets. As the director of Swisscom puts it: "Speed is important, not precision." This sounds strange in the ears of our old watchmaker nation which was very proud of the precision of it’s products. But as Bob Dylan’s song says: "The times they are a-changin".
Time was changed in a scientific way in 1967. An international conference on time was held to define time no longer by astronomic phenomenon but by the microwave frequency emitted by caesium-133 atoms when an electron alters it’s spin. Time is no longer defined by observing the macro universe but by watching the micro universe. The notion of astronomers as timekeepers was toppled by the physicists who defined "International Atomic Time" which is much more reliable than the good old "clock of heaven". The micro universe delivers a time-reference which is so stable that the best clock, built accordingly, would be less than 10 minutes off if it had started ticking 14 billion years ago when time and the universe were generated by the Big Bang.
I find it interesting to observe that our perception of time became independent of religion and from our observation of the heavens a very short thirty years ago. Time-keeping has become a completely rational and mechanised process. The "autonomous machine" is driven by microwaves and handled by electronic circuits and computers. There is even the bizarre idea that we should abandon second and minute and divide the day into 1000 so called "swatch-beats". In my opinion the so called "Internet time" is more a PR-gag of Swiss Watch manager Nicolas Hayek than a serious idea.
A religious relic in time and date calculation is still the Christian calendar which is based on the assumed year of birth of Jesus Christ. It was worked out in the year 525 by the monk Dionysius Exiguus. Without the use of a computer it may be, naturally, not very precise. We know, however, that a great number of tasks and time-tables are based on calculations using the "Christian time". In addition, we know that a tremendously large number of computer programs have been so badly worked out that we expect real problems when 1999 changes to 2000. I know that this is not yet the millennium change which is, of course, one year later. Nevertheless, the computer bug generated by the incorrect calculation of the 1. January 2000 is called the "millennium bug". Or in the USA, more correctly, the Y2K bug (Year-2000-bug).
Many years ago I was a computer programmer myself and to tell you the truth, it never occurred to me that the changing millennium would cause such problems in computer programs. There had been so many bugs and difficulties with the first computer programs then that no one even considered the year 2000 until a relatively short while ago. And now the problems have grown so immense that its costing the whole world about 2000 billion Dollars to debug and test the programs. That’s 100 times the cost of the moon landing 30 years ago. And yet there is no guarantee that there won’t be a massive breakdown when the bell tolls at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999, ranging from devastating computer breakdowns, electric power blackouts, lifts and trains coming to a dead halt, blockage of air-control systems and early warning systems sounding false alarms. And even if nothing happens it’s a desaster to spend this amount of money to debug a stupid computer bug instead of spending it for the world’s poor, for education and development.
Sometimes I ask myself how it could have been that experts of a technology which continuously claims to be the "technology of the future" could forget the simple fact that future also has a date. That the future doesn’t end with the year 1999 but hopefully continues into the next millennium. The answer is not easy. I believe it must have been the technocrat’s one-dimensional way of thinking that caused the millennium bug. It’s the belief that with the linear progress of time everything would also grow in a linear direction, endlessly faster, bigger and more sophisticated. It’s the belief that the world is unlimited in every dimension. So we extrapolate in a linear way that a computer program which is working correctly from 1980 to 1999 will be working correctly in the year 2000 as well. We are slaves of the "autonomous machine". On the other hand, computer experts assume that if there is a bug in a program it could easily be located and corrected in a short time ? a determined trust in the software. That is true if it’s one error or perhaps ten. But the truth is that there are millions of millennium bugs which are causing all this trouble. The quantity has become quality.
I’m convinced that you young historians think in another way. Knowing the basic forces of history you realise that there are always moments where quantity becomes quality, where evolution becomes a revolution. As I have attempted to explain, even the development of the idea of time and time measurement in history were not linear processes. There were many social and technological revolutions on the long road from the "clock of heaven" to the "autonomous machine" of time.
Thank you very much.
