[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Okay. So the other day, I—should we say who we are?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Yeah, I guess we should.

JAD: Okay. Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab. Okay, so the other day Soren called us into the studio.

ELLEN HORNE: There they are.

JAD: Oh! [laughs]

SOREN WHEELER: [laughs]

JAD: And there was a giant human-sized rodent sitting in the engineering seat.

ROBERT: Very large rodent. It was very familiar to us because it was a puppet head that we had toured with.

JAD: Who is that under that big shirting?

SOREN: Well, that's the question. That is the question. Maybe you guys should guess or something.

JAD: Oh, my goodness. Is it ....

ROBERT: Is this Ellen?

JAD: Oh, my gosh.

ROBERT: It is! Oh, my gosh.

ELLEN: Happy birthday, Radiolab!

JAD: All right, so the story is the reason that Soren got Ellen to surprise us is that somewhere around now is the 15-year—crazy to say it—15-year anniversary of making Radiolab.

ROBERT: 15 years.

JAD: I know.

ELLEN: We have some tape for you guys.

JAD: Oh, there's more?

ELLEN: We brought you ...

JAD: Besides just your presence?

SOREN: Well, yeah, I mean, the presences. I mean, it seemed like you ought to have someone around who knew you when, you know?

JAD: Okay.

ELLEN: I brought you presents with my presence.

JAD: So we sort of settled in. We didn't really know what was going on. And then Horne did something truly evil. She somehow—I don't know how, probably the archivists helped, got her hands on the very first one.

JAD: No! This is my nightmare!

ROBERT: The very, very, very ...

JAD: I had hoped these tapes would never surface, but she found them. They were on Bit Torrent for a second, and I thought they had disappeared. And I was, like, so happy. But then ...

ELLEN: Roll tape. Roll tape.

SOREN: You ready? Let me roll tape. All right, here we go.

JAD: 2002. Very first one.

JAD: Oh, God, don't start talking. Please make the CD crash right now.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Every radio producer has this idealized image in their head of you.]

JAD: Oh, God!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Maybe you're sitting on the couch, drinking coffee, staring out the window. Maybe you're the person who's driving, and you pull over to really concentrate on a story. Whatever the case, that image in the radio producer's brain of you, the listener, that's why they make this stuff. It's a lonely thing. You know, they don't get paid much. They lug around these heavy recorders and mics, and they look frankly silly in those headphones they have to wear. But it doesn't matter as long as you are there to listen to what they make. WNYC is about to embark on an experiment. We're calling it the Radio Lab.]

SOREN: I love that. The Radio Lab.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: What we're gonna do is take great documentary radio and stories of different sizes and shapes, colors. From different places, all over the planet, from different times even, and we're gonna mix it all together like this.]

JAD: Whoa!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: A big brew of people and places. But it'll take two hours and 59 minutes to get through all of it.]

ROBERT: Two hours and 59 minutes?

JAD: Did you hear that? Did you hear that? Two hours.

ROBERT: It's a three hour show.

JAD: It was a three hour show.

ROBERT: And was that every week, by the way?

JAD: Every freaking week.

ROBERT: Every week.

JAD: 8:00 to 11:00, every Sunday night.

ROBERT: So they were giving you a huge hunk of air time.

JAD: A huge hunk of air time where no one was listening.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Jad Abumrad here. I'll be your—hmm. Host is not the right word. Curator? Guide, maybe? How about DJ of documentary?]

JAD: Oh, shut up! Really?

ELLEN: [laughs]

JAD: That's terrible! That doesn't work at all!

SOREN: All right, I'll stop it.

JAD: Every moment of that was wrong. Every moment. I have to explain, like, the show was just super different back then. The idea of it back then was to just take all of these documentaries from around the world and smash them together, but what would end up happening is that, like, I would line up three or four things and I would have like a 20 minute hole which I would start to experiment in. And that's—those spots were what the show grew out of.

ELLEN: Well, so that was in 2002. And then I met you the following spring.

JAD: And then the whole year later.

ELLEN: A whole year later.

SOREN: So there's a year worth of that.

ELLEN: And by the time I met you back in New York, you were so sleep deprived.

JAD: Okay, so we reminisced for a little bit, and then we started talking about the moment when Robert got involved, which is a moment I'll never forget. So, you know, I was trying to fill one of those 20-minute holes. I had done an interview with a memory researcher, and it was just one of those science interviews that now we're super familiar with where, like, the scientist is using all this Latinate words. And I couldn't figure out what she was saying, but it still seemed interesting. I just couldn't understand it. And so Robert and Ellen and I had breakfast one day at Kitchenette.

ROBERT: It was like our—it was our foundation restaurant. That's where'd we go to for breakfast every week.

JAD: And we were sitting there and I was like, "I got this interview. I don't really know what to do. It's about memory. And here's what I think she's saying. I think she's saying something about how memories are never the same. You're always constantly remaking them." And then you just, like, snapped into this thing where, like, suddenly you were playing this—like, all these characters. And Ellen and I were like, oh, my God, let's just go into the studio and have him do that.

SOREN: You want to hear a little taste of it?

JAD: I'm sort of curious.

ROBERT: This is a one off?

SOREN: We later did the Memory and Forgetting as a podcast, but this is pre. This is before that. It's a different—earlier.

JAD: 2003, I think.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. We're coming up on the Kitty Hawk Centennial, the 100th anniversary of the first human-powered flight. It's in a couple weeks. And I was looking at the picture today.

ROBERT: No, you weren't.

JAD: The Wright Brothers. You know the one. Orville's on the plane, it's just taking off. Wilbur is running alongside. They're on a beach. The beach is deserted. It looks really, really cold. And I'm looking at this photo.]

JAD: Really.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Even though it is the most published picture in the history of pictures.]

SOREN: Where did that come from?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Even though anyone who's ever been born has seen it a hundred thousand times, I couldn't help but be wowed. I mean, look at what they did. They got that crazy box into the air a couple hundred feet or whatever it was. It wasn't that great a distance. But look at us now. We can fly over the Atlantic in five hours, a few hundred dollars. And that is not what we're gonna talk about today. Because my real question is: how is it we can do all that and still not understand some very basic things like common cold? That's the example that's always given. And what about memory?]

ROBERT: What about memory? Is that what ...

SOREN: That's a good intro.

ROBERT: What about memory?

SOREN: That was a minute 30.

ROBERT: Wow. That's sort of like, well, here's a pogo stick. I'm going to jump on it 50 times. But what about tissues?

JAD: [laughs] That's such a random way to get in. Do I eventually talk about Kitty Hawk, or was that just ugly random?

SOREN: No, no. But let's go a little bit further forward so we get to hear Robert enter the room.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Simon McBurney: It involves creativity.]

JAD: This clip actually begins with a reading from theater director and actor Simon McBurney.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Simon McBurney: You have to literally remake it every time. Every memory that you remember is different because it is remade in the very present that you remember. In other words, in order to remember, you need the imagination.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Simon McBurney performing a monologue from his play Mnemonic for the show Studio360. And with me in the studio to explore these ideas a little further is Mr. Robert Kruwich from ABC News. Hi, Robert.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: Hi.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: You've reported on this, right?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: Yeah, I have. I never actually met Simon McBurney, but that thought that he has at the very end, that in order to remember something, you need an active imagination, I think that's kind of understating it, really, I think.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Understating it? How so?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: Well, let's just take the situation we're in right now.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: I'm sitting here in front of you. We're about, what, three feet apart or something like that?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: So when you look at me right now, now, it takes actually the light that's bouncing off my face a tiny bit of time to reach your retina. But by the way, I arrive upside down and to have your brain right me. It takes a little bit of time for the sound of me, this sound right now you think, "Ha, ha." But the sound has to travel at 750 miles an hour from me to you.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: Then it has to enter that ear that you have. It has to travel through those hairs that you've got in your ear. It has to turn into electricity, and it has to go to the place in your brain where sounds lie. And then the touch of me, if I were to touch you right now, would have to travel electrically to your brain. That would take a little time.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Got it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: And the smell. Let's suppose I put some licorice in my mouth. [chewing] The smell of the licorice coming out of my mouth, that too would have to travel all the way to your nose, up your nose, into the place where smells lie. And then your brain has to take all these parts and pull them together into this, this thing that you think is going on right now.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Wait, let me get this straight. You're saying that this moment ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: Yes?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: And this one and this one.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Are hopelessly lost. So when people say, you know, you have to live in the moment ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: This is the moment. The moment already just happened. Just happened. Or to put it another way, it's a memory. Everything. Everything is a memory.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Wow. So let's say we want to ponder this moment. This one that you say has already happened before it even had a chance to become this moment. But let's say we want to remember it later. What do we do?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: It's interesting. What's gonna happen is you're going to take the touch, the sound, the smell, and everything that's in your brain from that moment, which is all sitting lodged in different places, and you're going to reassemble it, pull it back together again. Now here's the interesting thing. If 20 minutes from now you are really hungry, then the licorice—remember the licorice part of our discussion?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Mmm, yup.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: The licorice part will somehow loom a little larger because you want to eat or chew something.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Oh!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: How you're feeling in the moment that you're remembering has a lot to do with what you remember. So for example, let's just take a simple phrase like "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Right.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: If you want to recollect that phrase, let's suppose you just had a wonderful thing with Jill.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: Now when you think of the rhyme, when you reassemble it—Jack, Jill, Pail, Water," it'll go, "Jack and Jill [harp playing] went up the hill to fetch a pail of water." See, the Jill thing is so there for you.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Oh, okay, I gotcha.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: Or suppose that instead you've just come from an extraordinary hike where you have gloriously climbed a spectacular hill. So now you hear the thing, and when you reassemble it this time, "Jack, Jill, Hill, Pail, Water," you think, "Jack and Jill went up the hill [angelic singing] to fetch a pail of water."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: I see. The hill.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: Now the hillness has got all the emphasis.[

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: Yeah, I got it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert: So you're always remembering differently each time depending upon how you think.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jad: This reminds me of something. Here, let me play you this interview clip.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Every time you recall something you're doing so with the ...]

ROBERT: I mean, it's amazing to me that at such an early point, the business of deconstructing puzzles, which I guess is a lot of what we did, took on this very particular quality, like this kind of razzle dazzle of anything could happen in the next second. I don't know who's gonna say the next thing, but there's something beautifully organic about it when it's done.

JAD: Yeah. So today we're celebrating 15 years of making Radiolab. Coming up after the break, we're gonna play the first thing we ever podcasted. It's not something you can get on iTunes because it fell off iTunes a long time ago, but we're going to play you the first.

[LISTENER: This is Lisa Kenney. Calling from San Diego. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hey, we're back. So, the first episode we ever podcasted, I don't know if it was literally the first, but it was among the first few, was an episode about time.

ROBERT: I do remember playing it to my wife, who I was always scared because she's a New York Times reporter, and I thought, oh, she'll never like this kind of thing. And she came out of the kitchen and she said, "I really like that." And immediately I called ...

JAD: I remember you called me and you were like, "Tamar likes it!" You were whispering like, "Tamar likes it!" Yeah, it was one of the early moments where like, maybe this will work.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Again, this is something that fell off our podcast 80 years ago, so probably very few people have heard this.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: You know this music. Trust me, you've heard it your entire life. The reason you can't recognize it now is because the composer, born in 1770, intended for this moment, the one you're hearing, to last two seconds.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony]

JAD: Like that. However, had he been a whale, Beethoven might have written his Ninth Symphony this way.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony slowed down]

JAD: Changes that for us would take an instant would transpire over minutes, and a movement might last six hours. That's, in fact, what this is, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony digitally stretched from its normal 60-some odd minutes to last an entire day, 24 hours. And if you sit for the entire 24 hour duration of the piece, as people do from time to time, you realize that this music is not simply slower—the slowness unlocks something in the original. Maybe it was there all along and we couldn't hear it. But play with the meter—music is mostly about meter, after all—then the music has a different story to tell, a secret perhaps, locked up inside the routine. Change the routine, you make new discoveries. That's what we'll do this hour. We'll look at time so closely we'll discover new things about it.

JAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad. My guest tonight for the next hour to help me wrestle with time is the science correspondent Robert Krulwich of ABC News, and NOVA, and Nightline. How are you sir?

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm very well. I like this bathing in Beethoven thing you've got going on here.

JAD: It's cool, right?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Yeah. Actually, at the end of the program, we will be dropping in on a performance that happened recently in San Francisco where people listen to it over the course of an entire day.

ROBERT: A day?

JAD: A day. So where first?

ROBERT: Let's begin with a guy who I think you'll find—well, he thinks very deeply about time. In fact, in a very gentle kind of way you could say he's time obsessed. You've heard of the neurologist Oliver Sacks?

JAD: Sure. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

ROBERT: Yeah, right.

JAD: And Awakenings.

ROBERT: So I was over at his house—this is me actually over at his house right now.

JAD: Key turning.

ROBERT: And he told me this story.

OLIVER SACKS: I don't know whether this is relevant. I had an odd experience some years ago. In fact, in 1993, when I got a message from my publisher, which they had sent out to various of their authors, for their 21st birthday, their jubilee, asking if we would like to select a year from the previous 21 years and write about it. And when I got this message, I thought, "Well, why don't I choose 1972," which was the first of the years. And it's a year which is very vivid and important for me, partly because it was the year in which my mother died, partly it was the year in which I completed Awakenings. And these two events were coupled in some ways.

OLIVER SACKS: I was actually in the car when I got this message. I picked it up on a car phone. And I was driving up to Canada, and I had a tape recorder with me, so I spoke 1972 aloud. And by that time I thought, "Well, why stop? Why don't I do 1973, as well?" By the time ...

ROBERT: How long did '72 take? Did you get to Montreal or were you still ...

OLIVER SACKS: No. '72 probably took about half an hour. By the time I got to the Canadian border I was up to 1987. And I did, in fact, make an extra loop so that I could complete things.

ROBERT: [laughs]

OLIVER SACKS: However, it turned out that the most recent years, the late '80s and the '90s, I did not apparently have such detailed memories of, and they seemed subjectively shorter.

ROBERT: So time, I guess we all know this, is a very plastic thing. It's swollen and rich some of the time, and then it's like flaccid and eh other times. But because Oliver is so inquisitive, such an investigator at heart, all his life he's looked inside things. And beginning when he was 10, 11, 12, he wanted to get inside time.

OLIVER SACKS: I had lots of boyish interests. You know, these pre-adolescent interests. They all took a beating when I became an adolescent. But one of them was chemicals, and I had a chemistry laboratory. One of them was photography, and I had a darkroom and cameras. And one of them was plants. And in particular, my mother was very fond of ferns, and the garden was full of ferns.

OLIVER SACKS: I love the way in which the curled up fiddleheads or crosiers of ferns would unfurl, and it was almost as if time was sort of rolled up inside them, as if time itself unfurled. But one couldn't actually see this. They would perhaps take a day or two to do this. And I wanted to see it. It made me think of these Christmas things one would blow—braap—and these paper trumpets, which would unfold. And so I set up my camera on a tripod. And at least in the daytime—I couldn't take pictures at night, I didn't have a flash then—I took a series of pictures every hour or so of the fern and then showed these rapidly by putting them together in a flick book. And this way then, what took a day or two or several hours to happen was compressed into several seconds. So the compression of time, photographically, fascinated me.

JAD: Us, too. If Oliver Sacks can make a baby fern unfurl—Robert, how about this—radio producer Tony Schwartz can do the same thing with his baby niece.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Except in sound.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: Here, sped up for your appreciation is Nancy Schwartz from birth to age 12 in two minutes, 12 seconds, exactly.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: [baby crying] La, la, la—here come.

TONY SCHWARTZ: Jack and Jill went up the ...

NANCY SCHWARTZ: Hill.

TONY SCHWARTZ: To fetch a pail of ...

NANCY SCHWARTZ: Water.

TONY SCHWARTZ: Jack fell down and broke ...

NANCY SCHWARTZ: Crown.

TONY SCHWARTZ: And Jill came tumbling ...

NANCY SCHWARTZ: After. Happy birthday, daddy. Happy birthday! Happy birthday to you.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: If you called a toy store up and you say I want a puppy and a whistle and a horn and a hat and a dress and a ballerina costume, that's what you get. But Santa Claus can't bring it, you can cry.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: Tony, if the dog likes weeing in the house, if you have to make him house broken, if he makes wee wee in the apartment, have to slap him with a newspaper. Then if he doesn't do it again, he's housebroken.

TONY SCHWARTZ: What do you think of the Russians sending the dog up in the satellite?

NANCY SCHWARTZ: Well, I hope he doesn't get hurt, but if he does I'm sure they'll send up a medical satellite.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: In school, we each had to do a report on some place, and I'm doing a report on Hawaii. And we're taking notes and doing research. This summer we're going camping in the month of July this summer. But for the whole month of July this summer, I'm going to go to Brownie sleepaway camp. It's all girls.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: You'll miss my hair, and it's very special for tonight. It's just the way I wanted: a pageboy with a high top, and that's the way I like it.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: I'm taking guitar lessons, and that's fun. I take drama lessons after school, and that's great. And I've been working on the school newspaper. I might be editor next year. And I've been discovering boys.

ROBERT: You know what that is?

JAD: What's that?

ROBERT: That is if you were a parent, what you've just heard is a parent clock.

JAD: Huh! A parent clock? That's kinda cool.

ROBERT: Because the kid gets older. You can't deny the fact that you must be getting older, too. When your son has hair on his legs.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: I go, "Oh, man. I'm getting old!" But this is true. This is how the whole world works, I think.

JAD: Everything is a clock, I guess.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: By the way, that was "Nancy Grows Up," an audio flipbook recorded and arranged by the great radio producer Tony Schwartz. Thanks to him and to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. And also to you, Mr. Robert Krulwich, for joining me today on our program to talk about time.

JAD: So here's my question: if we've got an example of what you just called a 'parent clock.'

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: You've got other kinds of time like, you know, personal time, getting out of bed time.

ROBERT: Yeah, like, most of existence, really, time was measured by, "Oh, it's lunch time, it's wake up time ..."

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: It's time to milk the cow time. Events or task times.

JAD: Tasks times. How did we get from task and personal time to clock time?

ROBERT: Ah, now that's interesting! Let's go back to the 1800s, and imagine a guy, we'll call him, oh, Zoltan Chaboigon.

JAD: Zoltan Chaboigon?

ROBERT: Yes. Living in Sandusky, Ohio.

JAD: Interesting.

ROBERT: And suppose Zoltan wants to know, you know, what time it is.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: So if Zoltan walked into, say, Bigsby's Tavern and asked ...

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Mr. Bigsby could I trouble you for the time?

1. BIGSBY: It's right in front of you. You see this clock here? It's built by my nephew. Not the smartest boy in the world. It says 33 minutes past the hour.

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Is that right?

1. BIGSBY: Of course it's right!

ROBERT: However, if Zoltan, instead of going into the tavern, had he gone at that exact same moment into the bank building ...

BANK TELLER: How can I help you, sir?

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: I wondered if you could show me the time?

BANK TELLER: Three minutes past the hour.

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Is it right, though?

BANK TELLER: Yes, it's right.

ROBERT: Or at that very same moment, suppose instead of going to the tavern or the bank, he'd gone to the hotel.

HOTEL CLERK: Can I help you?

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Could you tell me the time, please?

HOTEL CLERK: Yes, of course. My timepiece here says ...

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Oh, is that silver?

HOTEL CLERK: Silver style, actually. It's 19 past the hour.

ROBERT: So at the tavern, it's 33 past the hour, at the hotel 19 past, the bank three past, what time is it really in Sandusky? That's the question. The answer is, there was no official time in Sandusky.

JAD: Huh? What do you mean there's no official time in Sandusky?

ROBERT: There wasn't any, not in 1850. The government didn't have a time.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: All there were, were clocks. So in Ohio in the 1850s, you'd have as many times as there were clocks in the town.

JAD: Huh!

ROBERT: So there was no reason, when you think about it, to synchronize. If your clock and my clock were four minutes or ten minutes different in Sandusky in the 1850s, who cares? Until the railroad changed everything. Once the railroad came in, if Zoltan wanted to take, I don't know ...

JAD: How about the 3:03 to Cleveland?

ROBERT: Okay. If he wanted to take the 3:03 to Cleveland, how would he know when it was 3:03?

JAD: Oh, I see where you're going with this.

ROBERT: If you went by the bank's clock, he'd arrive a half hour ahead of time.

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: [sighs]

ROBERT: If he went by the hotel clock, he'd arrive in the nick of time.

TRAIN CONDUCTOR: All aboard!

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Wait, wait, wait ...

ROBERT: And if he went by the tavern's clock ...

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Oh, no! Wait!

ROBERT: So for the sake of their business, really, railroads created railroad time and began putting up clocks of their own.

JAD: That makes sense.

ROBERT: And because the railroads were so important, I mean, the tavern would have to get its beer deliveries from the railroad.

JAD: And I guess the banks would have to get their cash from the railroad, and the hotel would have to get their guests from the railroad.

ROBERT: So gradually, railroad time becomes everybody's time.

JAD: So what happened to local time?

ROBERT: Well, local time disappeared.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Yeah. If local time means that when it's noon in Sandusky, the sun is directly over your head, by 1880 that wasn't true anymore.

JAD: Oh.

ROBERT: The railroad had instructed Sandusky that from now on, its noon would be 20 minutes later so it could fit into the railroad schedule.

JAD: Wait, so they moved noon over 20 minutes?

ROBERT: Yeah, and there were protests about this.

PROTESTER #1: I put it to you, ladies and gentleman, who owns noon in Sandusky?

PROTESTERS: We do, we do! Damn railroad!

JAD: So in all seriousness, people fought against this? They rebelled against this?

ROBERT: Oh, yeah.

JAD: They rebelled against the railroad?

ROBERT: Oh, there were time wars in certain towns, where part of the town would go to railroad time, but the other part would determinedly stick with what used to be local times, and they'd have different times in the town.

JAD: Wow! It's almost like it was a personal freedom issue.

ROBERT: Yeah. Because time, in a way, represents your own identity. And they didn't want to give up their identity to the railroad—not at first. But in the end, Sandusky, and then every other town eventually conformed to railroad time, and that is how time became standardized, time became zoned, time became clock referenced. When you ask somebody what time is it, they don't say, you know, "Oh, it's bedtime," or, "It's lunchtime." They don't look up at the sun. They look at a clock, a standard clock. And the railroads did that.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Every tick of a clock is time won or lost. Every 60-minute sweep, every 12-hour tour of those relentless hands are turning out carload lots of times.]

JAD: There's an interesting connection to explore here, and it has to do with horses.

ROBERT: Horses?

JAD: Horses. You mentioned railroad companies. It just so happens that the owner of the biggest railroad company, Leland Stanford. You know, as in Stanford University?

ROBERT: Oh, from Stanford University, yeah.

JAD: Right. He was really into speed, and he owned a really fast horse. And the horse's name was Occident.

ROBERT: Occident. I know. I remember that.

JAD: The story goes, this horse was the subject of a gentleman's bet.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Well, there was no gentleman's bet. It's a myth. Stanford, so far as we know, was not a betting man.

JAD: That's Rebecca Solnit. She would know. She wrote a book about this called River of Shadows, And the focus of her book is the solver of the bet—or whatever it was.

REBECCA SOLNIT: It was an argument. There's no evidence that there was money on it.

JAD: In any case, this argument among Stanford and his railroad buddies centered around the following question: when a horse gallops, do all four of its feet leave the ground at once? What do you think?

ROBERT: Hmm! I don't know. I mean, it's not a question that I would, frankly, ever ask anyone, but ...

JAD: Well, at the time it was a big question, because they had no way of knowing because horses moved faster than eyeballs could see.

REBECCA SOLNIT: So Leland Stanford wanted to prove that a horse had all four feet off the ground at one time, and he was recommended to try Muybridge as the photographer to capture this.

JAD: Along comes Edward Muybridge, the photographer. If he could take a picture of the horse at exactly the right instant, you could see whether all four feet were off the ground and solve the bet. Here's the problem: cameras in those days were very slow.

REBECCA SOLNIT: A fast exposure would be maybe a second or several seconds. Muybridge was going to push photography to suddenly be able to capture motion in a 500th of a second. Otherwise, you just got blur.

JAD: Blur. Imagine that first step out of the world of a blur. Muybridge had stretched a wire across the racetrack and attached it to the shutter mechanism on his camera. Occident the horse gallops by, trips the wire which freezes the horse mid-gallop, steals him right out of the flow of time. Except Muybridge doesn't take one photo, he takes 24. See, he placed 24 cameras in a line, one after the other, with 24 tripwires stretching across the racetrack. And the horse tripped every one. 24 frozen, unblurry, running horses.

ROBERT: So what did they see?

JAD: Well, the pictures formed a series of a horse running, and some of those photos showed Occident, yes, with all four feet off the ground.

ROBERT: [laughs] So the camera here unlocks a secret. It lets us see something you could never see before because this camera, essentially, it stops time.

JAD: Exactly. Meanwhile, says Rebecca, Muybridge became fascinated with learning more secrets of time, secrets locked inside basic human movements.

REBECCA SOLNIT: A leap, a splash, a walk, a pirouette.

JAD: Wow, how mundane!

REBECCA SOLNIT: But they're so enchanted when you really pay attention to them.

JAD: Yeah.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Muybridge had photographed rushing water. He was obsessed with water in his landscape pictures. So he obsessively has people pour water, splash water, pour water over themselves, pour pitchers of water, or pour water into glasses, splash water out of basins, bathe in water. And you can see all these droplets frozen in midair.

JAD: There's one particular photo, Robert, where you see a sheet of water suspended in the air, hovering over the splasher kind of like a ghost.

ROBERT: Hmm. Oh, wow!

JAD: Anyhow, take all those frozen moments and line them one after the other and play them back, and you've got flow again. Albeit artificial flow, which we call movies.

ROBERT: Movies are good.

JAD: Yeah, yeah. But the next time you're feeling stressed out and you say to yourself, "I'm stressed. I need to go to a movie to relax." Well, you should know that the technology that made the movies is exactly the thing which sped up the pace of modern life, which stressed you out, which led you to go to the movies.

ROBERT: I don't—what does that mean? What do you mean by that?

JAD: Well, one of the first ways movies were used was to film factory workers doing repetitive tasks, and then find out how to make those tasks more efficient.

ROBERT: So if I were pushing the levers maybe too slowly, is this how ...

JAD: Right. They would find the guy who did it the right way, film him, slow the film down, and then use that to teach everyone else.

ROBERT: And then when World War II came, this was not just now in the cause of efficiency, this was a life or death matter because this is how you beat Nazis.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: All the scientific devices of chronology are machines manufacturing time. The tools that are in our hands means victory, and our hands must be as relentless as the hands of our clocks.]

ROBERT: Or there's a whole 'nother way to think about this. Time can be a weapon in battle.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Or it can be the most sensuous and subtle and natural thing of the world. And I learned about this from a book by Jay Griffiths called A Sideways Look At Time.

ROBERT: Let me just take a stop here at the clocks, even though you don't like clocks, because there's so many cool clocks in your book.

JAY GRIFFITHS: [laughs] Cool clocks!

ROBERT: First of all, there's a spice clock.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes. We're used to clocks which you can see when it's really dark, and you can see that you've just woken up at 2:35 and you really didn't want to wake up at 2:35. But of course for a long time, you know, in the night you don't have a way of seeing what the time is, and so somebody invented a spice clock so you could taste your way through the night. So there would be maybe kind of, you know, cinnamon for about one o'clock and turmeric for two o'clock.

ROBERT: So you're sitting there in bed and you sniff the time?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Or you could taste it.

ROBERT: But how about the clock of birds? This is the Kaluli people.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Oh yes. Now this is lovely. The Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, they have what they call a clock of birds, and that certain birds like the New Guinea friarbird and the hooded butcherbird, when they sing in the mornings, the children are taught to understand that that's a signal to get up and leave and, you know, get out of the house.

[birds calls]

JAY GRIFFITHS: When those birds sing their late afternoon calls, that's a signal to the children to go back home.

[bird calls]

JAY GRIFFITHS: The forest in Central Hinds in Papua New Guinea, I've been there. It's a very, very difficult place to be in once it's dark, and the children would need to know at what time to start heading for home.

ROBERT: Now how about it's 1751, and Carl Linnaeus, famous categorizer of everything in Sweden ...

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes, made a flower clock.

ROBERT: What'd he make?

JAY GRIFFITHS: A flower clock, so that you could see by the blooming of different flowers what time it was.

ROBERT: Some kind of something that blooms in the morning and then folds up like a morning glory would be there in the morning, and then in the evening an evening primrose would come out?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes.

ROBERT: And these are all plants that open for an hour or two and then close. So if you're walking by, and you see a blush of, let's say, pink, then you go, "Oh, must be the morning." Or if you see a blush of purple you go, "Oh, it must be lunchtime." Or whatever it is.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

ROBERT: That's, by the way, very good gardening to be able to do that.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes, isn't it? Isn't it? And connected to that, there's also in the Andaman Forest in the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, that people have a scent calendar, which I find the most beautiful idea because what it was is a way of kind of describing the months by the scents of certain fruits and flowers.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Time is everywhere in nature. One of the things I wanted to do with the whole book was to say, you know, we think of time having to do with clocks. In fact, for most of the world, for most of history, time has been absolutely embedded in nature in some beautiful ways.

JAD: We'll hear more from author Jay Griffiths later in the program. Thanks Robert.

ROBERT: No, thank you.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I will be back in a moment.

JAD: So that was a chunk of the first thing we ever podcast. It was a show about time. And in honor of our 15th birthday, because it's funny, Robert, we just looked at our RSS feed recently, which ...

ROBERT: SSS is?

JAD: I don't know what it stands for. It's the thing that feeds iTunes.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: So when you go on iTunes and you see all the episodes, you sort of see what's there. And there's some limit that iTunes places on the number of items that you can have in the feed.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: And I think it's like 100 or 150 or something. And we realized, like, 150 early episodes have fallen off the feed.

ROBERT: Oh, really?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So if we were a backlist, like at Random House, that would mean, like, Hemingway and Fitzgerald have fallen onto the floor.

JAD: Exactly. So, like, this huge number of old episodes have fallen off. And I started looking at that list, and on that list are some episodes that are weirdly relevant now—a whole bunch that are just completely not relevant. And I was like, you know, I think I want to pull some of those back into the flow.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: And because it'll give us a chance to sort of just reframe them and really think about them and update them. And sometimes the science gets old and needs to be updated, but sometimes ...

ROBERT: Or sometimes the science gets refreshed by something that's happening in the real world.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: It gets on a certain urgency. Yeah, so what the plan would be is maybe, you know, in the coming months, we would go way back for us, which is like 14, 13, 15, 12 years back, and resurrect things and throw them out and see who wants to take a smack at them now, and whether things have changed, and whether they're more interesting or utterly wrong now.

JAD: Or wrong in a fascinating way. Yeah, that kind of thing.

ROBERT: That's the advantage of getting old, is you can ...

JAD: That's true. Yeah, that's true.

ROBERT: You can play with your memories.

JAD: Exactly.

ROBERT: And not be a rabbit. There you go.

JAD: All right. Well, that was—that was something.

ROBERT: Something. [laughs]

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

ROBERT: Yeah. We'll be normal next time.

JAD: Yeah. [laughs]

[LISTENER: Hey, this is Liza, and it would be unlike me to pass up a staff credit. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Soren Wheeler is senior editor. Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, David Gebel, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack and Molly Webster. With help from Valentina Bohanini, Nigar Fatali, Phoebe Wang and Katie Ferguson. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.]

 

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