Time and the Machine
Time, as we know it, is a very recent invention. The modern time sense is hardly older than the United States. It is a by-product of industrialism--a sort of psychological analogue of synthetic perfumes
and aniline dyes.
Time is our tyrant. We are chronically aware of the moving minute hand, even of the moving second hand. We have to be. There are trains to be caught, clocks to be punched, tasks to be done in specified periods, records to be broken by fractions of a second, machines that set the pace and have to be kept up with. Our consciousness of the smallest units of time is now acute.
Another time emphasizing entity is the factory and its dependent, the office. Factories exist for the purpose of getting certain quantities of goods made in a certain time. The old artisan worked as it suited him with the result that consumers generally had to wait for the goods they had ordered from him.The factory is a device for making workmen hurry. The machine revolves so often each minute; so many movements have to be made, so many pieces produced each hour. Resuit. the factory worker (and the same is true of the office worker) is compelled to know time in its smallest fractions. In the hand-work age there was no such compulsion to be aware of minutes and seconds.
Our awareness of time has reached such a pitch of intensity that we suffer acutely whenever our travels take us into some corner of the world where people are not interested in minutes and seconds. The unpunctuality of the Orient, for example, is appalling to those who come freshly from a land of
fixed meal times and regular train services. For a modern American or Englishman, waiting is a psychological torture. He has not lost the fine art of doing nothing. Our motion of time as a collection of minutes, each of which must be filled with some business or amusement, is wholly alien to the Oriental, just as it was wholly alien to the Greek. For the man who lives in a pre-industrial world, time moves at a slow and easy pace; he does not care about each minute, for the good reason that he has not been made conscious of the existence of minutes.
时间与机器
正如我们所知，时间是最近才出现的发明。现代的时间观念并不比美国老多少。它是工业化的一种副产品——是合成香水和苯胺染料的一种心理对应物。
时间是我们的暴君。我们慢慢地感到分针甚至是秒针在移动。我们非得这样不可。有火车要去赶乘，有许多时刻要打表，有任务要在特定时间内完成，有记录要以几分之一秒的速度去打破，有机器设定了运转速度要及时赶上。现在，我们对最小的时间单位的感觉相当敏锐。
另一个强调时间的实体就是工厂和它的附属物--办公室。工厂的存在就是以在一定时间内生产出一定数量产品为目的的。以前的工匠做工的.时间依自己而定，其结果使得消费者不得不等待工匠把他们订制的货物制做好。工厂是催促工人赶快干活的装置。机器每分钟运转多少次，就必须有多少个动作要完成，每小时就必须生产多少工件。结果，工厂的工人(办公室人员也如此)被迫以最小的时间单位计时。而在手工业时代则没有形成分秒的时间观念的迫切性。
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