With New Year’s Eve comes the ball drop in Times Square at the stroke of midnight. But in the late 1800s, Boston dropped a ball every day to mark the stroke of noon, because telling the time was serious business. The time ball, along with telegraphic signals and fire alarm bells, announced the exact time to the public, at a time when the exact time was critical to navigation on the high seas and safety on the newfangled railroads. With ultra-precise clocks made by local jewelers and true astronomical time announced daily by the Harvard Observatory, Boston Standard Time became the de facto standard for a wide swath of the country long before time zones were officially proposed and adopted.
Boston Standard Time
- Marking Modern Times: a History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life, Alexis McCrossen
- “Time Balls: Marking Modem Times in Urban America, 1877-1922,” in the American Culture Review, by Alexis McCrossen
- Selling the True Time: Nineteenth Century Timekeeping in America, by Ian Bartky
- “The Distribution of Time” in The North American Review, by Leonard Waldo
- We also discussed the Harvard Observatory in our episode about the women who worked there as “human computers.”
- The Woods Hole Time Ball
- “The Boston Time Ball” via Brown University’s Ladd Observatory blog.
- “America’s First Time Zone” via the Harvard Gazette
- “The New Time Ball About to be Installed at Boston, Mass,” in the Jeweler’s Circular and Horological Review
- Work at the Royal Greenwich Museum and watch a time ball drop every day
- A Boston Globe editorial arguing in favor of joining Atlantic Time
- A Hartford Courant editorial arguing against joining Atlantic Time
- The report of the Massachusetts Time Zone Commission
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is a new release by Brian Coleman. Buy Me, Boston is a collection of local ads and flyers dating from the 1960s to the 1980s. The publisher says:
Buy Me, Boston is a unique, time-traveling journey back to a city that exists only in the fond memories of longtime denizens. Whether you patronized these establishments and happenings the first time around, or just want to know more about our unique town and the people whose energy and creativity fuels it, this book guarantees smiles with the turn of every new page.
Some of the material is from the underground, while some is decidedly mainstream, like the full page ad taken out by the Filenes department store to announce that all their stores would close on November 25, 1963 in honor of President Kennedy’s death. It’s the stuff from the other end of the dial that interests us most: hand-lettered flyers for 80s punk shows, ads for strippers and call girls from the back pages of the Phoenix, window cards from a black barbershop in the disco era, porn theater marquees, the debut of a new kids’ show called The Electric Company, and more. There are flyers for political organizers of all stripes, from anti-war marches to a New Right organization that would seem at home with the rise of today’s alt-right. There’s even an ad for the grand opening of the Rathskeller on September 25, 1974.
Coleman is apparently a collector himself, and he has also scoured the collections of the David Bieber pop culture archives, the UMass Hip Hop Archives, galleries, record labels, and other local collectors. Why ads and flyers? An author’s note says, “The thing I have always loved about advertisements (including event flyers and posters) is that they are the most direct and honest way that any undertaking – whether it’s a theater troupe, a band, a restaurant, or a hair salon – has to communicate with the public. Advertisements are not mediated by journalists or editors. They contain exactly what the owner wants to say. Sometimes as are a mess; sometimes they are beautiful and/or clever. There is no right way to place an ad, but I have always respected anyone who tries.”
Upcoming Event
In this cultural moment, Samuel Seabury is probably best remembered as the worried-sounding character behind “The Farmer Refuted,” where he sings that “this congress does not speak for me” just before King George III steals the scene in Act 1 of the Hamilton musical.
In his own time, however, Seabury was more than just an outspoken loyalist who verbally sparred with Alexander Hamilton in a series of pamphlets. He was a Yale graduate and a prominent and well-respected minister in New York’s Church of England. After the American Revolution he led the transformation of the American Church of England into the denomination we now know as episcopalian. Central to this transition was the role of the King of England as the head of the church. As newly minted Americans, New Yorkers like Samuel Seabury could no longer take an oath of allegiance to the king, as the Church of England required. He went to Aberdeen to study the rites of the Scottish Episcopal church, then came home to serve as America’s first bishop. During his bishopric, he implemented a new liturgy that would be consistent with the convictions of his coreligionists, while upholding the patriotic values of his new nation.
On Thursday, January 8, this critical period will be the subject of a seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Brent Sirota of North Carolina State University will be presenting his paper on The Consecration of Samuel Seabury and the Crisis of Atlantic Episcopacy, 1782-1807. Here’s how the MHS website describes the event:
Samuel Seabury’s consecration in 1784 signaled a transformation in the organization of American Protestantism. After more than a century of resistance to the office of bishops, American Methodists and Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans all established some form of episcopal superintendency after the Peace of Paris. This paper considers how the making of American episcopacy and the controversies surrounding it betrayed a lack of consensus regarding the relationship between church, state and civil society in the Protestant Atlantic.
The event is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required.