100 Objects #15: Bundy Clock

How the time clock not only ignited a revolution in workplace efficiency and surveillance, but transformed our relationship to time itself.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 1:21Roman Mars?

  designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel. That flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision crafted performance. If you can imagine it, there was a time before time. Well, before clock time, that is. In fact, there were many decades in colonial America when most people had no earthly idea what time it was.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Most people, when they keep time, they just stick a stick in the ground and call it noon. They look for the shadows.

• 2:10Roman Mars?

  This is Michael Malley, a historian of time.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  What are you gonna do when it's cloudy? Well, there's animal cues.

• 2:17Roman Mars?

  You woke up with the rooster and at the end of the day.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  There's a phrase in American vernacular culture, till the cows come home. Well, the thing is, cows do go back to the barn at a certain time of day. So they could look outside and see the cows heading home, and they would know it was time for them to go home.

• 2:34Roman Mars?

  In the 1650s, the first public clocks were installed in Boston, Salem, and New York. And they were all the rage.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  New England towns would try to get a clock, and it was a sign of their kind of legitimacy. It would be used to call people to prayer, or you know, call people to church, or call the meeting.

• 2:52Roman Mars?

  And with this clock tower, suddenly, the clock was the center of everything.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Being in earshot of the town bells marked the borders of civilization. If you were out of earshot of the town, you were almost in the wilderness.

• 3:07Roman Mars?

  Life was becoming organized by the clock. But for the next 100 years, that clock said something different in every city. Noon was one thing in Boston, another in Providence, a third in New York. Fine for a farmer, a nightmare for a railroad running on a schedule. So in 1883, the railroad barons got together and tamed this chaos, carving the country into four standard time zones. But for the average American worker, that didn't mean much, especially when your employer could still decide what time it was.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  The clock calls you to work.

• 3:45Roman Mars?

  You still had to show up to the factory whenever the boss rang the bell.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  But people don't trust that because they feel like it's always being bumped ahead, you know, to get people in early.

• 3:55Roman Mars?

  Everyone knew the foreman messed with the time to get more work out of you.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  They could change it. They could make it ahead in the morning and behind in the afternoon, right? They could change it. That's the issue. So you never know if that clock is accurate.

• 4:08Roman Mars?

  And once you got inside, a human being was often the one deciding whether you were actually on time.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  So if you know Joe, the guy checking you in, if he's your buddy, you're gonna say, come on, Joe, give me a break. And he's gonna mark you as on time when you're not. Or, you know, conversely, if Joe is the tool of management and eager to punish people he doesn't like, he can mark you as late when you're not.

• 4:34Roman Mars?

  Everybody, employees and employers alike, thought this messiness of time was being used to cheat them. And into this mess walked an unlikely hero, a man who didn't care much about the factory, or power, or money. He just cared about clocks.

• 4:53Roman Mars?

  But the clock he built would do more than solve a workplace dispute. It would reorder America's relationship to time itself.

• 5:04Roman Mars?

  From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, the Bundy Clock, and how the first employee time clock sparked a revolution in workplace surveillance and efficiency.

• 5:22Roman Mars?

  Reporter Ellie Lightfoot has the story.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  The name of our unlikely hero, this man who would unwittingly change our relationship to time, he's called Willard Bundy. Willard was born in 1845 and grew up in Auburn, New York, a small but booming factory town in the center of the state. As a boy, he was kind of an engineering whiz kid.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  He liked tinkering with things. He built little toys.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  This is Tom Bazek. He works at the Bundy Museum, which, as you can imagine, is all about Willard Bundy.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  As a child, he would like take apart watches and try to reassemble them.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Willard grew up to become a professional watch tinkerer, a jeweler. Because back then, jewelers weren't just jewelers. They were the town's authority on time. It was their responsibility to build these big, accurate clocks and keep them on display in their shop window so that people could visit the window and see what time it was. And it was this part of the job that Willard loved the most. He'd spend hours and hours constructing these intricate novelty clocks, like this hulking eight-foot-tall clock that he claimed could keep perfect time for 1,000 years.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  It had dials for not only hours, minutes, and seconds, but also the day of the week, the date of the month, which particular month it was, and the year for 1,000 years.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  But this clock, which, by the way, he called the Wonderful Clock, wasn't just for telling time.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  It had bells and whistles that would chime on the hour, every hour.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  The thing was essentially a cuckoo clock on steroids. But instead of a bird popping out, Willard constructed this elaborate scene, a kind of mechanical diorama of a working mill.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  I think it's a lumber mill, actually. So the waterfall is transporting little logs to be cut.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  There was also a tiny pond with frogs and turtles and fish of every kind. There was a mini steam engine and a boat bobbing in the pond.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  This clock was so popular, such an oddity, that there actually had to be a police officer out front just kind of keeping the crowd moving along. Because people were so enchanted by it, they would just loiter in front of his store.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Willard had wrangled over 3,000 tiny pieces into a kind of masterpiece, which, to me at least, tells me that the man loved order. So it's not surprising, really, that he saw the messiness of timekeeping happening in factories across America as a giant problem he needed to solve. The story goes that one day, Willard walked into a factory in his town and saw how the bosses were keeping track of their employees' time. They assigned each worker one of these little brass disks and expected them to toss it into a bucket every morning to mark themselves present. But the system was a mess. It was sloppy. There was no accurate record of when the guy actually showed up. And Willard, he couldn't help himself.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  He saw a system that existed, but it wasn't up to snuff.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  So back in his shop, Willard started building something that was up to snuff. And in 1888, he patented it, the first employee time clock, the Bundy Clock. It was basically an ornate wooden box mounted on the wall, kind of like a grandfather clock, except underneath the clock face, there was a little slot for a key. Each worker got their own key. And every morning when they showed up to work, they'd insert their key into the slot, turn it a quarter turn, which would then stamp the exact time they got there onto a ribbon of paper. But after he patented it, Willard wasn't really that into the idea of selling it.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Willard was content to stay in his lane, I guess. You know, he wanted to make these very specific objects that brought him joy. He wasn't necessarily looking to get rich. He wasn't trying to redefine the system.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Maybe Willard wasn't trying to get rich, but his brother was.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Willard's younger brother, Harlow, is gonna play a huge role in the story of the Bundy Clock. But Harlow wants things Willard doesn't. In fact, the Bundy Brothers couldn't have been more different. And it's clear, our museum man has a favorite.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Everything that we know about Willard tells us that he was a genuinely nice guy. He was well-liked in the community. His younger brother, Harlow, was the complete opposite. He was rude. He was curt. He was a jerk.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  While Willard, the inventor, was a softie.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Supposedly, he was just like the most romantic man that you can think of.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Harlow was not.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  He had a very poor reputation throughout town.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Willard was more than happy to spend 20 years making a single clock. But Harlow, the brother with the business mind, saw the dollar signs almost immediately.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  He was aware of what his brother was inventing. He said, hey, if we market these clocks, they're going to sell like hotcakes.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Eventually, Harlow convinces his inventor brother to go into business with him. But the Bundy clocks do not immediately sell like hotcakes.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  A lot of business owners didn't necessarily see the need for a time clock like this.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Plus, this clock was expensive.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  A Bundy clock was $75, which I want to say that calculates to about $1,500 to $2,000.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  The other problem was that for the first year, they tried to market these clocks directly to workers. They would take out ads in union magazines or newspapers in factory towns that would read.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Hey, factory worker, make sure your boss is paying you correctly. Encourage him to buy a Bundy clock.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  But this strategy turned out to be a big old flop.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  If the idea was you get all of your coworkers to rally around this device and tell your boss to buy it, they're not going to, you know, they're gonna do what saves them money.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  The bosses weren't going to listen to their workers. So pretty soon, they dumped that idea.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Someone at the company has the genius idea of flipping the script. They put out ads that read, hey, factory owners, make sure you aren't being cheated by your lazy dishonest workers. Buy a Bundy clock, track their hours.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Ding ding ding, nailed it.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  And, you know, then they start selling.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  We don't know for certain which brother came up with this, but in Tom's mind, this is classic Harlow.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  I'd like to think Harlow was in charge of the advertisement. With everything that we know about his character and demeanor, a lot of the early ads sound like he wrote them.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  They were just kind of aggressive. Like, there's this one that's just a giant picture of a bulldog.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  It's the head of a bulldog biting through a time ledger, a timesheet, and the caption reads, put a watchdog on your payroll.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  This new ad campaign, it works. By 1898, they've got 9,000 of their clocks in circulation and are just dominating the market. But then, around the turn of the century, the Bundy's joined forces with the makers of the punch clock, a new invention where workers wouldn't need to fuss with a key. They could just insert a piece of paper, pull a lever, and stamp it. And after Harlow markets the hell out of it, these clocks actually do sell like hotcakes.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  And part of the reason that these clocks sell so well is because they tap into a growing demand. At this point in industrialization, the scale of production is really ramping up.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Factories are employing thousands of people, and they're vast in their size.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Historian Mike O'Malley again. He says that before this, when factories were smaller.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Surveillance of your employees is easy. Like, for example, Ben Franklin is a printer, and he lives above his print shop. So his employees are more or less in a house belonging to Franklin, right? He sees them all the time. He knows they got drunk last night because he heard them.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  So as the bosses hire more and more workers, ones they couldn't physically see, they began to think of themselves as facing this new existential problem.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  They can't identify who's a good worker, who's a bad worker. They don't know who's working hard and who's not because the scale has become too big.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  So in come the Bundy brothers with a fix. They're saying, use our machine to surveil your employees. They're selling a new way to sort workers, not by a human, by the clock. Just look at this old ad for a Bundy clock that Mike loves to point to.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Here's an ad from 1911. It's so sinister.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  At the top, there's this massive clock and a long line of workers waiting to clock in.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  There's working men and working women. And some of them are kind of well dressed, and some of them are dressed like laborers. And some of them are just dark silhouettes because they showed up late. And they were able to be discovered in their slackerhood by the clock.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  There's arrows shooting out from the clock, pointing to these slackers with a line of text that reads, "The Bundy clock points out your unprofitable employees. Now you can sift out the efficient employees from the inefficient."

• 14:42Speaker 01

  The element of moral judgment is really pronounced about punctuality. And it's, it's punctuality is a virtue, lateness is a sin.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  These ads reveal that the Bundy brothers were selling more than just a way of keeping track of your employees. They were selling a new moral structure. It's simple. If you're on time, you're fundamentally good. If you're not, you're fundamentally bad.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  One of the ways that merit gets reimagined, it's someone who has these, internalized these machine-like habits of punctuality.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  But the workers resisted internalizing these machine-like habits of punctuality. Actually, they hated it.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Was very much an instance of your boss implicitly saying that they don't trust you.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Also, it doesn't actually matter anymore if you're on time. Because if you work in a factory with a thousand workers, you're gonna have to wait in a long line to clock in.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  There's an imposition to show up early, to stand in line. You know, if your shift starts at seven, hopefully you can clock in at seven or a little bit earlier.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  And now, if you didn't, everyone would know.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  There's a very loud bell that goes off. So you'd be heard over the noise of a factory, and you'd manage to, no one'd come and yell at you.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  And then, there's the whole number thing. You were assigned a key with an employee number on it.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  So rather than, you know, John Doe or Jane Smith, you're now employee number 20.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  In fact, Tom at the Bundy Museum found these political cartoons made by postal workers in the 1890s, where the workers are just hurling darts at the Bundy clock.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Vandalizing the clocks. There were a number of political cartoons or poems or songs written about just how poor of a reception Bundy clocks had.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  But it doesn't matter what the workers think. The bosses had a new way to surveil their employees, and they loved it. But that's just the beginning, because there's another guy coming in, a guy who's gonna take Bundy's invention to the extreme. Not just to track when people show up, but to control how they work, to measure every single second of their day.

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• 20:13Speaker 02

  While the Bundys are out there selling their clocks to factories across the country, about 200 miles south, in Philadelphia, there's another guy who's also interested in time in kind of an obsessive way. He's about to take the Bundy clock and completely change how it's used. His name is Frederick Taylor.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  He's a weird guy, Taylor. So he's born to the Philadelphia upper class. His family does the grand tour of Europe. They have servants. They have a house, box sleigh. They have an estate. And so they're born to privilege and he could have been idle.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  But Taylor wasn't built for idleness, or arrest, or fun, really. Take, for instance, the classic leisure game of croquet. When it came time for Taylor's turn, he'd make his friends wait while he squatted down to measure every possible angle from which one could approach the ball. Only then, with this data, could he calculate the exact vector the ball needed to follow in order to pass through the hoop accurately. As Fred Taylor grew up, he continued to be kind of odd. Instead of going on to an Ivy League, as his father had, he decided to apprentice at a hydraulics factory in Philly.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  It's a weird move to make. And his family is kind of like, well, what's wrong with Fred? But he loves the work. He loves it. He loves working with his hands.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  And he can't believe what the workers around him are capable of.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Taylor is really dazzled by these guys because they're making, you know, big cylinders for a steam engine, big, heavy industrial parts.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  And he was so dazzled, actually, that he tried very hard to blend in. He started dressing like them, talking like them, swearing a lot.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  You know, telling dirty jokes and going to the bar after work and things like that.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  But on the inside, Fred Taylor is really not like these guys.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  He comes to the shop floor with an innate sense of superiority. Right? Like, Philadelphia upper class is notorious. I'm from Philly. One of my friends is from the Philadelphia upper class. There's no greater snobs in America than the Philadelphia upper class. And, you know, they're superior to everybody else. And he grows up with that sense that he should be running the show.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  And with a sprinkle of nepotism, he soon is. Taylor gets hired at a steel factory down the road where his parents were friends with the factory's owners. He gets promoted to foreman, and right away, he begins to wage a war on what he saw as laziness.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  He said, "Workers were always guilty of slacking on purpose because they know if they do more, they're going to be asked to do more every day. And then they're going to be asked to do yet more, and they won't get any more money."

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Taylor's first strategy was to incentivize the fastest workers to produce more. A few extra bucks if you make more than the guy next to you. But the workers stuck together and kept making things at the pace they always had. So instead, Taylor shows up one day to the shop floor with a stopwatch. His plan was to focus on one worker performing a single task and time every aspect of it.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Let's say I'm working a lathe.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  The thing workers would use to shape steel.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  And he'd sit there with his stopwatch, and he'd watch me work.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Taylor would start the clock when he saw him doing anything he thought to be productive.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  But when I did things he thought were unproductive, he would stop the stopwatch.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  By unproductive, Taylor meant anything resembling human.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Like talk to his neighbor, "Hey, Fred, how about those Phillies?" Or if he hitches up his pants, or he walks over to get another tool, Taylor will stop the stopwatch.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  When the job was done, Taylor would cut out all of these unproductive, quote unquote, "waste" movements to land on what he called was the standard time it took to do any job.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Famously, he extends that to shoveling. So at Bethlehem Steel, where he tries this, there's actually a shovel shed that you have to report to. And you'll say, "Yeah, I'm here. I'm going to do shoveling this kind of coal." And, "Okay, here's your shovel, Smith, and this is the motion you're going to use. And you're going to do it for this long in this motion, and then you're going to take a break for this long, and then you're going to go back. And at the end of the day, you should be able to move three tons of coal."

• 24:15Speaker 02

  But in reality, these times were just physically impossible.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  No one can keep that pace. The quality will slip. You know, I'll suffer physically.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Despite this, Taylor enforces these standard times anyways. The workers who can't keep up are docked pay, or more often, just axed entirely. And like the Bundys, Taylor uses the clock to create these categories of men. First-class men, for those who complete the task in time. Second-class men, for those who don't. It's not surprising. The men at the factory absolutely hate it. They call him a fool, a tyrant, even a slave driver right to his face. It gets so bad that the workers start sabotaging their own equipment so that if they miss a quota, they can say it's the machine's fault, not theirs. And when that doesn't work, they just start threatening him directly. They tell him to watch his back on his walk home. And it's at this point, about a decade in, that Taylor

• 25:10Speaker 02

  decides it's time to leave Philly and take his managerial philosophy on the road.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  He advances himself as the first sort of efficiency expert, efficiency consultant.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Except, it's a bit more extreme than that.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, see, it's the gospel of efficiency.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  It's kind of like Jesus. If, instead of him turning water into wine, he timed how long it took you to do it and demanded you do it 30% faster. And like Jesus, Taylor starts gathering up disciples. I'll call them Taylorites, who he trained to spread the good word of efficiency to other factories and textile mills across the country. But the key to Taylor's expansion, the part that's often overlooked, is actually the punch clock, the one Bundy and his new company created.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Now, it was central to Taylor.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Because as factories got bigger, enforcing Taylor's standard time with actual humans became practically impossible.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  The boss doesn't want to stand there watching him. Come on, Schmidt.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  So instead, the job of the enforcer went to a clock. Now, there's a punch clock at every station to time how long it takes a worker to do every task.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  So he's supposed to go, boom, punch the clock, start, do the thing, punch the clock when he's done. It's the logical extension of just clocking in.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  The logical extension of what the Bundy clock introduced. Because now, instead of just clocking in in the morning and out at night, each part of the job gets its own punch in and out. Each moment is timed, mechanized. But this use of the punch clock, it actually does something else. It accidentally invents a whole new category of job. Because at the end of their shift, workers would hand in their little time cards to what Taylor called the central planning office. There would be an entire staff.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  They'd collect those cards and say, you know, "You didn't do it at the right time, or you took too long on this."

• 27:07Speaker 02

  And these people aren't bosses. They're not workers. They're not foremen. They're this new type of bureaucrat, whose only job is managing other people's time. Essentially, they're the nation's first middle managers. The sufficiency expansion. It's all going according to plan until Taylor gets hired at a US Army facility outside of Boston called Watertown Arsenal. This is where Taylorism is going to face its biggest challenge yet.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Taylor is hired to come in and do one of his efficiency studies, and that means he's going to do this stopwatch time study.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  So he and his army of stopwatch-wielding disciples show up and start timing everything incredibly closely. Imagine, you're molding these intricate parts out of steel. You spend your entire shift bent over your workbench. I'm talking 90 degrees, folded in half, your face inches from it. And standing directly over you, staring down at the top of your head, is a Taylorite in a three-piece suit, stopwatch in hand. After hours of this, you're going to need to stand up straight for a second, stretch your back, maybe wipe the sweat from your eyes. But the moment you do, you hear the click of his watch. He's timing it. He's writing it down. For him, these are waste movements.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  He's actually got it down to where he sometimes recommends hiding the stopwatch in a book. There's a picture in one of his publications of a book that's been cut away and a stopwatch inside. So I'm just reading this fascinating novel, but actually, I'm, you know, I'm surveilling you. They get really upset. They get really truculent. And if they can, they'll drive him away.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  This, for me, is where the story gets really interesting. The start of what I can only describe as clock warfare. Because it's here that the workers decide to put their own pocket watches to use. They say, if they see a Taylorite timing something, they're going to time it, too.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  They have to be able to say, "No, you stopped that too soon, right? Or, "This is how long it takes me to do it. I timed myself." Right? Boom, I timed myself. You don't know how to do it.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  One day, a Taylorite starts timing one of the workers while he does a job. The Taylorite says the job should take 24 minutes. The worker says that when he timed it, it took 50. He's being told to work twice as fast. And this could not stand. That night, they meet up and come to an agreement. They say, "The next time a Taylorite tries to study us with a stopwatch, we'll just stop working." And the very next day, that happens. A Taylorite comes up to a worker with a stopwatch, and this time, the guy just refuses to go along with it. He gets fired immediately, and his fellow workers, watching all of this, walk out behind him. Eventually, things at the factory get so heated that in 1912, there's a full congressional hearing to investigate Taylorism and whether his efficiency

• 29:57Speaker 02

  methods were damaging the government's workers.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Workers testify, "We don't object to working hard. We are proud of our skill, and we're proud of our craft, and we're proud of our ability to get the job done. We do object to being driven by a stopwatch."

• 30:13Speaker 02

  This is Roman reading the actual words they said.

• 30:16Roman Mars?

  "I don't object to their finding out how long it takes, but I do object to their standing over me with a stopwatch, as if I was a racehorse or an automobile. Our objection is to having someone standing over you as a slave driver. The stopwatch is equivalent to a whip. You might just as well have that."

• 30:35Speaker 01

  The workers, again and again, refer to the stopwatch as the problem.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  It was this object that was taking away their freedom. One union leader testified...

• 30:44Roman Mars?

  "It wipes out the individuality of a mechanic. It simply makes him part of a machine. He does not think for himself. He has others to think for him."

• 30:53Speaker 01

  "The meaning of being a skilled artisan will have been materially degraded. You know, I won't have control over the pace in terms of my labor. I'll be made into a machine-like entity."

• 31:04Speaker 02

  When it's their turn to take the stand, the Taylorites don't shy away from this. Actually, they double down. They're like, "In our system, working men are literal machines," as one of them put it.

• 31:15Roman Mars?

  "A man is a portable power plant. He has a boiler down here, the stomach, which consumes food. The processes are not dissimilar to burning coal in the grate. He has an engine in here, his heart, which is a pump."

• 31:28Speaker 02

  But the senators are not having any of this.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  They're red-faced with rage at each other. You don't see this in the testimony because it's edited, but they're cursing at each other and shaking their fists at each other.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  In the end, the workers actually win. Taylorism and stopwatches are banned from government-run factories until 1949. But to Mike, this win wasn't really a win. It represents this turning point in American history where workers stopped fighting against mechanical time itself and actually, in a way, kind of embraced it. Because as much as they said they hated the stopwatches, the workers at the arsenal weren't trying to get rid of them or vandalize them like workers had with the first Bundy clocks. It was actually the opposite. To fight the stopwatches, they brought their own.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  There's no way around it, right? There's no way to combat this except with clocks. And you're going to have to be able to use the language of the manager to combat the manager. They have to adopt the language of the oppressor to free themselves from oppression. So are you really free, right? I'm free to punch a clock. That's it.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Taylor died only a few years after the investigation at Watertown, but his disciples were alive and kicking, spreading the good word of efficiency far beyond the walls of the factory, to offices, to schools, to hospitals. In fact, Harvard Business School built much of its early curriculum around Taylor's ideas. Taylorism was even brought into the American home by two of his closest disciples, a couple named Frank and Lillian Gilbreth.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, they're a married couple. Frank is a brick contractor, but he becomes obsessed with Taylorism and what he calls the one best way. There's a one best way for doing any job in the universe. And supposedly Gilbreth is the guy who sets up the thing where the surgeon goes scalpel, forceps, you know, and then they put it in his palm. Supposedly that's Gilbreth.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Frank worshipped Taylor, but it's his wife, Lillian, who left the real legacy.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Lillian Gilbreth is actually sort of the founder of home economics.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Lillian does for the home what Taylor does for the factory. She conducted studies where she timed women making eggs, doing laundry, doing the dishes. She was obsessed with maximizing what she called, quote, "happiness minutes." But as you can imagine...

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Rarely does it decrease the amount of work. It just, work moves to some other task, or the expectations for the task go up.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  In the end, this really is the impact of Taylorism, too.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  People end up doing more work for slightly more money. I mean, the classic observation about Taylor is that he's got, I don't know, I'm going to make these numbers up, but he's got 140 people, let's say, and he reduces that to something like 45. And the wages of those 45 go up a little bit, but they don't go up as much as the savings to management. So they're working harder for slightly more money, and they don't realize the dream of leisure.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  If you've heard about the gospel of efficiency before, you're probably aware of this idea, that the invention of the dishwasher or the laundry machine didn't suddenly give women back hours of their lives. This is one of the major skepticisms around AI. It's like, okay, maybe these machines make us more efficient, but more efficient to do what exactly? Usually, the answer is more work. In a way, this is probably the realist, maybe the sneakiest, legacy of Bundy and Taylor. Because at some point, this impulse towards surveillance and efficiency stopped coming from the bosses, and it started coming from us.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  The idea of self-regulation as a moral virtue is really important. You know, this is Weber's point, that we all become our own jailers. Why do I work? I have tenure. Why do I work hard? I'm my own jailer, right? It's a personal obligation to work. It's not that there's a guy standing next to me saying, "Work, you dog," right? I've internalized the impulse to work. It's become a moral imperative for me, and for most of us. People work because they have to earn a living. They work because they have to make money. But there's also a sense that it's a duty, and not working is a waste of your talents, or it's sinful, or it's sloth, right?

• 35:48Speaker 02

  The morality of working hard is not a new concept. The Protestant work ethic and all that has been around since the first settlers. But the difference now is that morality has been powered by clock time.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  You're constantly self-surveilling. There's a kind of identification of the person with their watch.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  This idea that we've become identified with time, with our output, with how good we are based on how much we worked, it might seem like it snuck up on us. But if you look back at the ads from the very beginning of this industry, all the way back to the 1880s, you can see that this was kind of the point all along. Mike showed me one of these ads from 1888 that I think is kind of amazing.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  It's a cartoon of a little, round, stout guy, and he's looking at his watch.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  The ad is made up of six little drawings of a man, the same man, over and over again. In the first drawing, he's looking at his watch, looking normal. Then, in the next figure, he's looking at his watch, but now he's a little bit rounder. And in the next one, he's even more round. Then numbers appear on his face. Then the minute hand and the hour hand appear on his belly.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  And he's looking at his watch, and he habitually looks at his watch so often that eventually he turns into a watch. This was supposed to sell watches.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  This was an advertisement to sell the clock. This was supposed to get people in 1888 to say, "Yeah, I want that."

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was our first thought. It's monstrous, right? But it's the safety and security of being somebody who's under the discipline of timekeeping. I think that's what they're offering.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  And we bought it, because merging with a watch seemed like becoming something good.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Well, you're not unruly. You're not one of the unruly classes. You're not one of those workers who they have to physically surveil. You're not one of those workers who's truculent and potentially lazy. You're not disruptive. You're not going to be the subject of police interest, because it indicates your safety as a citizen of an industrial society. There's a merger of self and object that goes on. But the analogy to me would be to this compulsive checking of your devices, you know, always synchronizing yourself to the mothership.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  I want to go back to the brothers who started all of this. The brothers who began this revolution of mechanized time in the workplace, Willard and Harlow Bundy. Because their ending is kind of tragic and also kind of telling.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  These two brothers, Willard, the tinkerer who made the clock, Harlow, the businessman who figured out how to market it, they'd struck gold. But as the company expanded and became less about inventing and more about selling, the brothers started to come apart. While Harlow gained more and more power, Willard was being systematically phased out. He went from superintendent of his own company to a lowly contract employee, working out of a room on the fifth floor that he had to rent. Willard's son even begged Harlow to pay Willard more money.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  He had approached Harlow one day and said, "I think my father should be making much more money. These are his clocks, his inventions, his life's work." Harlow responds with, "No, he's signed a contract. He's being paid adequately."

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Maybe Harlow started to see his brother as one of those slackers in the Bundy clock ads, just trying to cheat his boss out of more money, whatever it was.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  The brothers' feud went on for about two years, and Harlow eventually gets sick of it, so he ended up firing his own brother.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Willard tries to start his own clock company, but Harlow sues him over and over again.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  The brothers stayed in legal battles for the rest of their lives and never again spoke in person.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Lawsuits drain Willard's family of resources, and in 1907, only four years after striking out on his own, he dies.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  For Willard, the lifelong inventor, the craftsman hero of our story, for him to end up like this, in a rented room on the fifth floor, irrelevant in his own company, I think you can argue that this is the outcome of the thing he invented, the employee time clock. Because whether he intended it or not, it started a process that helped strip the craftsmanship and skill from the hands of the working people. It turned the men who made the machines into machines themselves.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, Harlow stayed high up in the company. He retired, built a 10-bedroom palace in Pasadena, and left his wife multiple millions in today's dollars.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  The company, in the end, merged with a few others to become none other than IBM.

• 40:52Roman Mars?

  Reporter and producer, Ellie Lightfoot.

• 41:16Roman Mars?

  A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Ellie Lightfoot. Our other producers are Priscilla Alabie and Brenna Daldorf. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Iver Manley. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Too. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelé, and the production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.

• 42:01Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM Podcast family headquartered in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful White City, West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].

• 42:42Roman Mars?

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• 43:22Speaker 05

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• 43:52Speaker 06

  This podcast is supported by Nurtac ODT. Remedy Pant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nurtac. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtac can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtac is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to Nurtac ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur.

• 44:34Speaker 06

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