This Sunday [April 2] as you set your clock ahead for daylight-saving time note that you're holding the tool Western Europeans used to conquer the world. A clock? Conquer the world? Yes. Western Europe's domination began with clocks.
The power to measure time helped turn the backward ninth-century tribes of Europe into the powerhouses of the world 600 years later. Europe trailed, in the ninth century, far behind other regions. The Muslims, for example, already excelled in mathematics and mechanical innovation, and China had already pioneered steel making and gunpowder. Yet by the 15th century Western Europeans ruled the world.
Portugal had expanded west to Brazil and east to the Indian ocean, Spain claimed the Americas, and the Netherlands had developed an Asian empire. And by the 19th century Western Europe's domination reached its apex in Queen Victoria's empire, over which truly the sun never set. How did these backward ninth-century Europeans accomplish all this?
The obvious answer is "science and technology," but there is a more specific answer — one that warms my engineer's heart — and that is numbers. Or better put: quantifying the world by numbers. The West brought together mathematics and measurement to record reality, and thus the power to control it. And this brings us to clocks.
Clocks were the first way Europeans quantified the world. The chime of the town clock chopped the day into numbered segments, calling out the time to start or stop trading, or go to church. This was a sharp contrast with days marked only by dawn and sunset.
Such quantification spread to all aspects of life. Numbers affected music, armies, art and navigation. The free-form Gregorian chants of the ninth century gave way to music with a rich meter controlled by a clock. And it was a short step from regimented music to regiments and powerful armies. The political philosopher Machiavelli noted that just as a dancing man "keeps time with the music, [and] cannot make a false step; so an army that properly observes the beat of the drums cannot easily be disordered."
Paintings from the ninth century look odd to our eye; they seem flat and lifeless. It was the use of numbers that gave artists the power to put perspective into their paintings. Artists could now create realistic pictures. And from these geometrically accurate paintings evolved maps filled with gridlines, lines that divided space into numbers. The maps overflowed with compass bearings, depth measurements, tide tables and even the times pirates might be expected. These number-laden maps guided sailors across the seas to conquer new worlds.
Bookkeepers and bean counters, armed with numbers, followed the sailors. These merchants and bureaucrats used double-entry bookkeeping to control commerce, industry and government. Double-entry bookkeeping doesn't sound like a world-changing innovation, yet it allowed a merchant to "picture" the reality of the business. Bookkeeping was an essential tool, or quantification, that allowed Western Europe to rule the world.
The poet Auden summed up the result of all these numbers for the West: We live in societies "to which the study of that which can be weighed and measured is a consuming love." Not to me: Tomorrow my alarm clock will screech and command me to divide my day into bits and pieces, but when I rise, especially with one less hour of sleep, I probably won't feel like following my Western heritage and conquering the world.
William S. Hammack is a professor of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a writer for the History News Service. His radio commentaries on "Engineering & Life" are heard on public radio stations.
