“Punctuality was to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries what standardized units of measurement were to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth and what computers would be to the late twentieth. It brought people into line with one another. Life regularized and became more orderly. These clocks were considered a modern marvel the world over because people knew that if the one at the place St. Sulpice registered exactly twelve noon, the ones at the Trocadero and the place Vendome and on the Ile de la Cite showed precisely the same time. The mechanism behind this magic was air. A central clock was connected to a machine that compressed hundreds of discrete charges; when the clock struck a new minute, the air bursts pumped out through miles of tubing each to their corresponding clock, where the thrust of pressure clicked off the next machine.”
Russell Shorto, Descartes’ Bones
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