One of the deepest held dogmas of our modern era is that faster is always better. Hurrying almost all human endeavor, everything from cargo shipments to personal communications, is one of the chief aims of the globalized, market-driven, high-tech economy. And the glories of speed are often invoked as justification for whatever discomfort or suffering this globalized economy inflicts upon millions of people. It’s too bad that roaring aircraft disrupt people’s sleep and that the constantly accelerating pace of production at work induces stress, but that’s the price of progress. As Stephen Kern, a historian at Northern Illinois University whose book The Culture of Time and Space details the speed-up of life between 1880 and World War I, declares, "technologies that promote speed are essentially good."
But is this really so? If we, dare I say, slow down long enough to really study the ever quickening pace of life, it’s a much different story. Speed offers us clear benefits (think of ambulances), but also a whole host of disadvantages, most of which are dismissed as nostalgia (kids able to play in the streets) or as the inevitable price for the comforts of modern living (thousands killed in automobile accidents).
The accelerating pace of life is really a rather recent development in human history. From the time of Caesar to that of Napoleon (roughly 1800 years), the top speed at which people, goods, and information could travel stayed essentially the same: the pace of a swift horse or good boat in a strong wind. Then came a flurry of changes speeding up our lives.
Late 1700s: Improvements in upholstery allow stagecoaches to pick up speed; an increase in French road deaths was one immediate result.
Early 1800s: The modern age dawns in a cloud of steam, as railroads and steamships dramatically accelerate the speed of transportation — and life itself. As locomotives in England go faster and faster, concerns are raised that passengers will suffer crushed bones from travelling at speeds as high as 35 mph. This particular fear was unfounded, but the new faster era was responsible for a level of carnage unimaginable in previous times, thanks to train wrecks and boiler explosions.
1830s: European visitors are fascinated by the frantic pace of life in America. An English observer noted that the average New Yorker, "always walks as if he has a good dinner before him, and a bailiff behind him." Another visitor described American eating habits as "Gobble, gulp, and go."
1876: Wind-up alarm clocks introduced by Seth Thomas; punctuality takes a stride forward since there’s no longer any excuse in being late for work.
1883: Fredric W. Taylor pioneers industrial time management, where workers’ movements, down to the smallest twist or turn, will be dictated by bosses to maximize efficiency and boost speed. Work will never be the same.
1890s: Swelling popularity of new sports like football and basketball, which are governed by a clock. They will eventually overtake baseball, which unfolds at its own leisurely pace, as America’s national pastime.
1892: An English medical study notes a leap in deaths from cancer and heart disease between the 1860s and 1880s, a time period that ominously corresponds with a dramatic increase in the tempo of English life.
1898: There are fewer than thirty automobiles on the streets of the United States. A decade later there will be more than 700 factories producing automobiles, and the pace of life and peace of the streets will never be the same again.
1900: Motion pictures speed up the pace of everday life — literally. During their early years, movies record action at sixteen frames a second and show it at twenty-four frames a second.
1909: Italian Futurist poet Filippo Marinetti declares a new aesthetic of speed: "We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."
1912: The captain of the Titantic, hoping to set a new transatlantic speed record for ocean liners, steams into an icefield at full throttle on the ship’s maiden voyage.
1914: World War I begins, and swift new communications technology helped light the fuse. After the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Serbian diplomats, who were raised in the slow-moving era before telegraphs, were flummoxed by an ultimatum from Vienna that they respond within 48 hours to Austrian demands or face immediate invasion. They don’t reply in time and the war is on.
1922: The 1920s roared forward, with advertising setting the pace. A DuPont ad celebrates chemical engineers by noting, "It is he who has helped make your minutes as long as your great grandfather’s hours."
1937: Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People is a phenomenal bestseller because in an age of escalating tempos he tells people how to make friends in a hurry.
1940s: The mass production techniques that won World War II by turning out thousands of battleships and tanks in a hurry are applied to civilian life. Even towns can be quickly mass produced, as seen in modern suburbs like Levittown, New York. But some residents complain that they are towns but not communities — houses thrown up quickly with no attention paid to the important connecting tissue of neighborhood shops, public spaces, and public life itself.
1953: Carl Swanson introduces his first TV dinner with turkey, gravy, cornbread, peas, and sweet potatoes.
1960s: People are beginning to wonder what happened to all the leisure promised by time-saving devices. Studies show that the amount of our time spent on household chores has gone down a bit since the 1930s, but we’re busier than ever, with driving, shopping, and longer hours at work more than filling in the gaps in our schedule.
1971: Madison Avenue realizes that TV ads can make the same pitch in half the time (at half the cost) by using faster-paced commercials. Almost overnight the standard one-minute commercial is cut to thirty seconds; the tempo of American life would never be the same again.
1973: Federal Express service begins. The company sets near-records for the amount of money lost, but survives and will eventually quicken the pace at which white-collar America works.
1980s: The debut of the nanosecond, a measure of time lasting one-billionth of a second. "This marks a radical turning point in the way human beings relate to time," says Jeremy Rifkin, author of Time Wars (Simon & Schuster Books, January 1989). A snap of your fingers takes 500 million nanoseconds.
mid-1980s: Although fax machines had been around for years, they were not commonly used until now. Suddenly FedEx seemed tortoise-like.
1990s: The average duration of an American business lunch, once famed for its three martinis, has been downsized to thirty-six minutes, according to Fast Company magazine.
late-1990s: Widespread use of E-mail makes that walk to the fax machine seem criminally time-consuming.
Much of the information above came from the books: Timelock: How Life Got So Hectic and What You Can Do About It, by Ralph Keyes (1991, HarperCollins) and The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, by Stephen Kern (1983, Harvard University Press)