Could I Bother You For The Time?

The 19th century was truly a magnificent period of invention and technological advancement.  However, two specific inventions of this period not only transformed how people went about their day to day lives, but completely altered the entire concept of time and distance.  What were these two masterful strokes of human ingenuity you might be asking?  Why the steam locomotive and the telegraph of course you silly goose.  Just think about it.  Prior to the steam train, the speed you got anywhere was entirely dependent upon how fast you get your horse to go.  The locomotive cut travels times to a fraction of what they once were, moving at speeds so fast that the worry warts of the era feared their bodies wouldn’t be able to handle it.  Concurrently, prior to the telegraph, the fastest you could get a message anywhere was again dependent upon how hard you could whip a horse without it keeling over.  In comparison, the telegraph provided near instantaneous communication, allowing people miles apart to converse back and forth as though they were in the same room.  For the people of the 19th century such things seemed as amazing as Star Trek teleporters.  It was the start of something that would eventually lead to the jetliners and internet connections of today.        

So, what the hell does this have to do with the time you may be asking.  Well, calm the fuck down for a moment and I’ll tell you.  Prior to the mid-1800's, what time it was depended entirely on where you were.  Every single city and town kept what was called local time, which was measured via a myriad of techniques depending upon where you lived.  Cities and towns of all sizes had one or more town clocks, large mechanical monstrosities usually placed high up in prominent positions where they could be easily seen by a lot of people.  These clocks were used by individuals to set their own clocks and watches, hence all the dinging and donging to mark the progress of the hours.  The clocks in the cities were set by a bunch of eggheads in observatories who used complex mathematical formulas involving the positions of the stars each night to figure out the time.  The method used in smaller settlements was less refined, with the town clock basically set off whenever some local yokel though the sun was at its highest point in the sky, hence the whole high noon thing.  As you can probably imagine, this led to a huge mess of times across the country, with every town and city having its own local time.  However, none of this really mattered since no person and no message was able to travel fast enough to make it matter.      

That changed when the railroad and telegraph networks began to cover large swaths of many countries by the mid-1800’s.  At first, the new inventions were more of a solution than a problem.  For instance, one of the first uses of telegraph lines was to send time updates from observatories to the wider world, allowing any town on the telegraph network to keep their clocks as accurate as possible using a calculation to take into account the time it took the telegraph signal to travel through the lines and differences in longitude compared to the observatory.  However, this standardization did not take towns off of local time, it simply made local time much more accurate than some dingus looking up at the sun.       

While such differences in time didn’t really matter to the telegraph companies, it was a huge issue for the railroads.  When people moved at horse speeds it was very easy to adjust for the differences in local times.  However, the trains traveled at a much higher rate of speed, so fast that the discrepancies between local times caused huge problems with accurate scheduling, which aside from being annoying, at times caused accidents.  Tiring of such shit, the railroads eventually developed what became known as railroad time, where large chunks of the country were combined into a single local time.  This allowed for much more accurate scheduling.  However, for a time it was still a confusing mess, with each railroad company having their own railroad time.  This resulted in the walls of more popular railroad stations just being completely covered in clocks, causing huge headaches for anyone trying to convert from local time to the appropriate railroad time.  Eventually it became a big enough pain in the ass that the all of the railroads agreed in 1882 to work off of the same railroad time, dividing the United States into four zones.  These zones, and ones like them around the world, became the basis for the modern time zones.  Eventually this system completely replaced local time, with most major countries around the world accepting it by 1929.  However, some countries continued to use local time until 1986.   

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_(UK),_Elizabeth_Tower,_-Big_Ben-_--_2010_--_1979.jpg

Newtonian Ass Whoopings

In 1667, Issac Newton invented calculus, the mathematical mother of the modern world and the bane of teenagers everywhere, except for nerds of course.  He was only 25 years old, you know, that same age you spent “trying to find yourself” or whatever.  Anyways, fucking Isaac Newton.  The guy who had the apple hit him on the head, which is complete bullshit by the way.  The guy that invented the cat door because he got sick of his damn cat always wanting to go outside.  Yeah, that guy.  Anyways, don’t stop reading.  I know I said calculus, but trust me, the rest of this has nothing to do with math.  Nope, not a bit.  This isn’t about calculus at all.  This is about what good old Isaac did with the rest of his life. 

Now one might think that being a math genius means that you end up automatically getting a job at a university or something.  Well, if that's what you think, then you're absolutely right.  For the next 26 years Newton hung out in the halls of higher learning, mostly Cambridge, just mathing that shit up.  We're going to skip over all those years, because again, this isn't about math.  What we won't skip over is the fact that throughout the same time period, Isaac was also fiddling around with alchemy, you know, the whole psuedo-science of trying to turn lead into gold which was super popular amongst various idiots back then.  For Isaac, alchemy was more a hobby, but like anybody with a crazy hobby, he probably dreamed of it making him fantastically rich.  Isaac never did get fabulously rich, but he did get a very bad case of mercury poisoning, which caused severe insomnia, paranoia, confusion, and the shakes.  By the end of his tenure at Cambridge, he had gone from being the greatest mathematical genius of his time to an easily confused man who spent most of his time writing about religion, including claiming that he could mathematically prove that the apocalypse was going happen in 2060.  Basically, the man needed a new gig.

Isaac first tried his hand at politics, theoretically the perfect place for a religion obsessed man with severe mercury poisoning.  He was elected to the English Parliament, but did little during his term of office beyond complaining about a cold draught and demanding all the windows be closed.  His one real accomplishment was to convince a group of idiots that a local nearby house wasn’t haunted, not because of any sound reasoning, but simply because it was Isaac fucking Newton telling them that they were being dumb asses.  It goes without saying that Isaac’s political gig didn’t last long since even politicians are expected to at least pretend to do something.

Isaac's next job was working for the royal mint, since you know, the leap from preeminent mathematician to government clerk makes a lot of sense.  The job, given to him by a friend as a favor, was basically supposed to be him just sitting on his ass and collecting a paycheck.  However, not knowing this, Isaac went at his new job with a gusto.  England at the time had a huge problem with the counterfeiting of silver coins.  Which was surprising given that the punishment for being caught involved being drug by a horse, hanged, gutted, having your balls cut off (if you had them), and then being cut into four roughly equal sized parts.  Isaac proved to be very good at hunting out counterfeiters, thanks to him apparently being one of the few people working for the mint who could differentiate silver from other metals.  He took great delight in catching counterfeiters, but even more delight in their conviction and execution.  Isaac was so good at his job that he was made head of the royal mint only a few years after being hired.  Isaac loved his job.  He oversaw the interrogations of all suspects (fun fact, interrogation back then most definitely meant torture), and even at times put on a disguise to go undercover on the mean streets of London (which probably involved him going from bar to bar jovially asking people if they, you know, like to do some counterfeiting or something, because he was cool and, you know, totally not a cop).

Isaac kept his job at the royal mint for thirty years, during which time he lived rather comfortably on his high salary (you don't want the head of the royal mint underpaid you know), though he did lose a lot of money speculating in the stock market.  Isaac also managed to get a little mathing in on the side here and there, though again, we’re not going to talk about that.  Good old Isaac finally died at age 84 after a large gallstone blocked his urinary track, meaning he couldn't pee, resulting in a deadly infection.  Oh yeah, he also died a virgin, probably should have mentioned that earlier.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sir_Isaac_Newton._Mezzotint_after_J._Smith,_1712,_after_Sir_Wellcome_V0004248.jpg

No One Remembers The Maine

In 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, sparking the Spanish-American War, a short, often forgotten, conflict which shifted the U.S. from just being that yellow country on the map above Mexico to a global imperialist power.  The cause of the Spanish-American War has long been debated, with some claiming shadowy plots by evil businessmen, but in actuality, like most wars, it was all just a bunch of bullshit.   

By the end of the nineteenth century, Cuba was the last remnant of the glorious Spanish Empire which had once ruled over nearly the entirety of the western hemisphere.  Though Spain had once been the center of the western world, nobody really gave a shit about it anymore, with the exception of maybe bullfighting aficionados.  Though Cuba was owned by Spain, it did most of its trading with the United States.  American businessmen made a lot of money growing sugar in Cuba and shipping it back home to sate the burgeoning American sweet tooth.  However, all of this sweet money making came under threat in 1895 when Cuban exiles, staging from the U.S., invaded the island and started a revolt.  The Spanish military moved in to quell the rebellion, but being kind of bumbling idiots, they decidedly failed to do so.  As the war dragged on, it began to cut into the profits of many American companies, prompting them to push for the U.S. Congress to force Spain to find a peaceful end to conflict.  The instability of war was decidedly bad for business.

Enter two prominent newspapermen.  Hearst and Pulitzer were the two most powerful newspaper magnates of their era.  Kings of their industry, the pair were in the middle of a knock down drag out brawl for readership, both constantly on the hunt for sensational stories to drag American eyes onto their periodicals.  The revolt in Cuba certainly fit the bill.  As the conflict dragged on, the desperate Spanish began herding large groups of people into internment camps and using other such less than popular strategies.  The American newspapermen latched onto the stories, and then embellished the fuck out of them until they were pretty much works of fiction, you know, to really make them pop.  Both newspapers were filled with stories of atrocities, massacres, and rape carried out by the Spanish authorities, and even the occasional strip search of a comely American tourist or two to spice things up a bit.  The made up stories enraged the American public, who increasingly demanded that something be done.  Now of course with so much public outcry, the U.S. government couldn’t be seen just sitting on their hands like some kind of dull witted dullard, so in the spring of 1898 they quickly dispatched a battleship, the U.S.S. Maine, to Havana to protect American interests.  However, soon after arriving the ship blew up because some idiot was smoking in the coal bunker.  Guess which half of the last sentence was included in the newspaper headlines.        

Enter Teddy Roosevelt.  Teddy was a brash squeaky voiced man who dreamed of glory and future political power.  He was also Assistant Secretary of the Navy.  With the U.S. and Spain on the edge of war over the whole Maine blowing up thing, Teddy decided that it was time to be the calm head in the room.  However, for Teddy this meant waiting until his boss was out of the office, and then sending out several orders, which he most certainly did not have the power to send, putting the U.S. Navy at full combat readiness and ordering a fleet to start sailing toward the Philippines, which were also owned by Spain.  Such a dick wagging provocative move sank any change of diplomacy, and soon after war was declared between the U.S. and Spain.  Not wanting to get left out of the action, Teddy resigned from his cushy government post so he could form his own volunteer cavalry regiment, which was something you could just do back then.  Teddy’s new regiment, dubbed the Rough Riders, was made up of high bred east coast athletes, drunken cowboys, snooty polo players, and Native Americans.     

The invasion of Cuba went about as well as can be expected.  Commanding the U.S. forces was a general who was noted for being kind of brilliant, but also extremely fat, and an aged senile former Confederate general who was convinced he was still fighting the Yankees in the Civil War.  Though Cuba was in the tropics, the soldiers were still wearing their winter coats because nobody had bothered to issue them any summer clothing.  Things were further hindered by Teddy, who was so desperate to see his name in the newspaper that he kept leading his Rough Riders on suicidal attacks against hills that really didn’t need to be captured.  Despite all this, the Spanish army was somehow even more inept, and the U.S. won the war after less than four months.  Spain was forced to give Cuba its freedom and to give the U.S. the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and a bunch of tiny islands nobody gave a fuck about.  Seventy-five percent of the U.S. troops returned home suffering from Yellow Fever, Teddy was catapulted into a public figure who would become president in less than three years, and sugar shipments from Cuba continued unabated until old Fidel Castro hit the scene in the 1950’s.  

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charge_of_the_Rough_Riders_at_San_Juan_Hill.JPG