The Long Way Back to Ourselves

6.10

The Clock, the Factory, and Consumption

This episode tests the familiar story that factories invented clock discipline, tracing it to E.P. Thompson's 1967 essay, and shows it fails its own test: a 1355 charter proves a bell in Aire-sur-la-Lys regulated clothmakers' hours before factories existed. What changed, the episode argues, was not the measure of time but who controlled it, illustrated by a 1911 strike at the Watertown Arsenal over Frederick Taylor's stopwatch system. It traces how Ford's assembly line at Highland Park cut chassis assembly from twelve hours to under ninety minutes in 1913, forcing the five-dollar day to slow worker turnover. It closes with the 1924 Geneva cartel of light bulb makers that fixed bulb lifespan at 1,000 hours.