[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.

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