book
Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World
Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Why this matters here
Landes’s Revolution in Time narrates how mechanical clocks and related time disciplines remade modern coordination—church bells, factories, trains, navigation—until inherited divisions of the day feel natural rather than chosen. Living in Sediment uses failed decimal-time experiments and the stubbornness of sixty to show civilization-scale lock-in: elegance loses to the density of practices already woven into everything else. The source is a history of clocks and modern timekeeping; the book asks how sedimented measures become almost impossible to renounce.
