Paris in the late nineteenth century was a city propelling itself into modernity through urban transformation, infrastructure and technology that promised a vision of a networked future.¹ An essential component of this vision of the future was widely distributed standardised time; an aspiration that Mustafa Dikeç writes that mid-nineteenth century Paris was struggling to achieve.² The city had been attempting to install a system of electric clocks since 1852, however by the 1870s it still hadn’t taken off due to various political disruptions and technological delays.³ Therefore, when Austrian engineer Victor Antoine Popp and his coworker Ernest Resch attended the 1878 Paris Exposition to exhibit a network of pneumatic clocks, the Prefect of the Seine was receptive, and immediately authorised the system’s uptake.⁴

The pneumatic clock network transmitted compressed air to public and private clocks throughout Paris’s inner arrondissements.⁵ In a central transmitting station, a pendulum clock sent a burst of air every minute through pipes strung in the sewers, branching off into public squares, commercial venues, and private homes where time was to be delivered.⁶ It was a new urban infrastructure, moving through subterranean Paris to deliver a modern time for a modern era.

The system was initially successful but short-lived: it was terminated in 1927.⁷ However, despite their lack of longevity, the pneumatic clocks offer a vision of modernity from a place and time where networks and infrastructure stood as metaphors for progress.⁸ This dissertation treats the pneumatic clock system as a piece of infrastructure that is both a material object and, according to Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel’s definition of infrastructure, a ‘dense social, material, aesthetic, and political formation’.⁹ An investigation of the pneumatic clock network opens up rich questions concerning social time in nineteenth-century industrialisation, the spatial underground as a new conceptual site of modernisation, and the clocks’ physical presence as an infrastructure entering urban spaces.

The pneumatic clock system can be placed in a Marxist history of capitalism’s effect on temporal experience, and specifically labour patterns. Marxist historian Moishe Postone distinguishes between ‘concrete’ time, pre-industrialisation, where labour practices were organised around completing tasks, and ‘abstract’ time, developed in the advent of factory work, where labour is organised around a shift pattern. Under this latter mode of working, time becomes a unit of value, and thus is a commodity. The pneumatic clocks were widely promoted as offering a material, distributable, abstract time, useful in creating a modern, commercialised city. An 1881 edition of Journal of the Society of Arts advertises the clocks through describing the increasing necessity for standardised time in urban places of business, saying that ‘Time is money’ is becoming more and more an axiom’.¹⁰ Pneumatic time’s role in supporting the commercialised city was also widely criticised in satirical publications. An 1882 edition of Le Rigolo tells a story of the advantages of pneumatic clocks in a worker’s home, allowing him to ‘not miss his workshop time’; arguably a veiled criticism of the imposition of a new temporal authority under which, as Jeremy Rifkin writes, the worker was expected to surrender his time completely to the employer.¹¹ Another journal, La Lanterne de Boquillon, published a story where a protagonist spends a day walking from one pneumatic clock to another to check their accuracy (a fruitless task); rejecting the city’s new temporal doctrine through behaving in the manner of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, a figure who uses idleness as an antithesis to an increasingly fast-paced metropolis.¹²

The pneumatic clocks can be read both through their offering of a new temporal experience, and through their physical presence in Paris. The company who produced the clocks published section drawings showing how pneumatic pipes were strung in the underground sewers, piping time from below up into houses and public spaces. The drawings were in the style of ‘coupe anatomiques’: street sections that showed the underground as a site of new networks and infrastructures such as gas, water, and electricity, placing the subsurface as an actor in the production of a socially and industrially modern city.¹³ The nineteenth-century underground was a space of systems and networks, as well as a conceptual space of utopianism and expansion. Historian Rosalind Williams writes about the nineteenth-century underground representing both scientific and technological discovery, as well as expansion and production. A proliferation in hollow earth fiction and underground sci-fi helped in the production of a new collective imaginary space of discovery and techno-optimism. Understanding the underground as a site of modernity and futurity gives it significance as the place through which pneumatic pipes ran, so imbuing the pneumatic network with these associations.

A second space in which the pneumatic clocks exerted a material presence was the home; an examination of the clocks’ presence in the domestic sphere offers up questions concerning their relationship to women consumers, and domestic rhythms. A promotional booklet published by the pneumatic clock company in 1880 advertises the benefits of pneumatic time to housewives. This appeal to women speaks to a history of addressing female consumers as a means to market technology. The introduction of both the sewers in the 1870s, and electric networks in the 1920s, used campaigns to make housewives more comfortable with infrastructures entering the home.¹⁴ The pneumatic clock company employed similar tactics; addressing the housewife who, nervous of unknown danger and sewer gas from the underground, might have feared an infrastructure that breached the border of the home. Through speaking to the women consumer, the company is able to extend the reach of the pneumatic clocks, and thus extending abstract time, into the home and so involve the domestic sphere in the temporal rhythms of capitalism.

Reading a history of Paris’ pneumatic clock network allows a view into a city transforming under the new social structures, temporal rhythms, and urban imaginaries of nineteenth-century industrial and technological development. Telling the history of this obsolete and short-lived technology offers a reflection on the landscape of excitement about progress, networks and infrastructures which allowed them to flourish.