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The invention of the schedule

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• The invention of the schedule
• Bibliography

The invention of the schedule

“Imagination, in effect, accelerated all possibilities.” (Garfield 42)

I couldn't help but get bored with the introduction to the Mallard. Popular wisdom tells us that there are three types of autistic people: those obsessed with trains (Simon Garfield belongs to this group); those who have studied Wars from the campaigns to the submarines; and those who question even their own gender (here I am). The good thing is that it is easy - at least for me - to understand the fascination with mechanisms.

Systematic thinking allows us to understand technology acting not only on itself or its direct environment, but also to think of reality as many interconnected abstract machines. The clock is not only a device that generates a periodic movement of its hands, but also harmonizes its frequency with the rest of existence. In the same way “in Germany the trains seemed to shrink time, as if they were a magical artifact” (Garfield 42). Due to the machinic need for synchronicity, society adjusts, “before the arrival of the train, few saw it as necessary” (Garfield 39). It seems wrong to me, however, to suggest that the locomotive was what allowed man to win the fight against nature, or that it even makes sense to propose such a dichotomy, since "the reference in each town was usually the town hall or town hall clock." church and the time was still set from the midday sun” (Garfield 39), the cathedral had already established a schedule theologized as natural, but which in reality is something totally arbitrary, that the sun traces a trajectory with a maximum point at The sky is a natural phenomenon, but it becomes useless as a reference when our own paths are so extensive that they relativize it, hence, once a superior measuring instrument emerges, people naturally adapt better to it.

When the local time was changed to that of the railway "people noticed, but, as it was known that it was a very precise clock, in a matter of a year the churches and businesses of the city changed their time to adapt to it" ( Garfield 40). The issue is not only political, but also technical, because precision matters, or rather technique is political, so “the employees' watches were, systematically and deliberately, five minutes late to alleviate the rush of the passenger who I might be late” (Garfield 42).

When I studied a little Kant I was told the story that people in Königsberg synchronized their watches when they left home, always at the same time. With the description of the scale model of the Mallard I was reminded of that. The mastery of time is the subject of the systematizing mind of the autistic. The legend of the philosopher has a lot of truth.

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Bibliography

Garfield, Simon. Timekeepers: How The World Became Obsessed With Time (Canongate, 2016)