<P> Economically, their impact was even greater; an awareness that time is money, a limited commodity not to be wasted, also appears during this period . Because Protestantism was at this time chiefly a religion of literate city dwellers, the so - called "Protestant work ethic" came to be associated with this newly fashioned time discipline . Production of clocks and watches during this period shifted from Italy and Bavaria to Protestant areas such as Geneva, the Netherlands, and England; the names of French clockmakers during this time disclose a large number of commonly Huguenot names from the Old Testament . </P> <P> In the nineteenth century, the introduction of standard time and time zones divorced the "time of day" from local mean solar time and any links to astronomy . Time signals, like the bells and dials of public clocks, once were relatively local affairs; the ball that is dropped in Times Square on New Year's Eve in New York City once served as a time signal whose original purpose was for navigators to check their marine chronometers . However, when the railroads began running trains on complex schedules, keeping a schedule that could be followed over distances of hundreds of miles required synchronization on a scale not attempted before . Telegraphy and later shortwave radio were used to broadcast time signals from the most accurate clocks available . Radio and television broadcasting schedules created a further impetus to regiment everyone's clock so that they all told the same time within a very small tolerance; the broadcasting of time announcements over radio and television enabled all the households in their audience to get in synch with the clocks at the network . </P> <P> The mass production of clocks and watches further tightened time discipline in the Western world; before these machines were made, and made to be more accurate, it would be pointless to complain about someone's being fifteen, or five, minutes late . For many employees, the time clock was the clock that told the time that mattered: it was the clock that recorded their hours of work . By the time that time clocks became commonplace, public, synchronized clock time was considered a fact of life . Uniform, synchronized, public clock time did not exist until the nineteenth century . </P> <P> When one speaks about the intellectual history of time, one essentially is stating that changes have occurred in the way humans experience and measure time . Our conceived abstract notions of time have presumably developed in accordance with our art, our science, and our social infrastructure . (See also horology .) </P>

Ep thompson time work discipline and industrial capitalism