Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

And then how to advertise this service in a way that would encourage and simplify this procedure? One of the most important agreements was how the timetable would be represented visually: it was decided to use roman numerals based on the 12-hour format. The conferences increased in number and productivity each year: the founding members were soon joined by Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland and Portugal, and the standardisation of time from London ensured that passengers increasingly made the right connections. The meetings were held twice a year, for summer and winter timetables, until the First World War brought cooperation and, in many cases, cross-border travel to an end. (War undid much that was noble about the railways; their potential facilitated modern warfare. The Duke of Wellington would surely have recognised their worth, as of course did Mussolini.¹⁶)

      It won’t be so long before the train shifts its symbolic status as a model of speed and alarm to a model of sedateness; we shall soon see the car overtake it as the epitome of speed and stress. But first let us travel back to other tracks and tempos, and to charming old Austria, where a man with crazy hair is about to conduct a nervous orchestra.

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       1 A neat loop: Hachette’s founder, Louis Hachette, founded his publishing and part-work empire on train station bookstalls in the 1820s, in the same manner as W.H. Smith.

       2 When a statue, bound for King’s Cross, was cast in 2015 to mark the 75th anniversary of Gresley’s death, there was some controversy in the railway and duck press over whether a mallard should appear at his feet. The duck appeared in the early designs, but in the end, it was decided against.

       3 At that very moment, the world record set by a steam train was still 124.5 mph, recorded two years earlier on a run between Hamburg and Berlin. The passengers on board, jubilant in their achievement, included Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. Hitler would hear of the news directly from Joseph Goebbels, who had drawn up the passenger list. The achievement was a victory not just for German engineering, but for Nazi supremacy.

       4 Seasonably unreliable canals, the other slow method of transport at the birth of the railways, were principally for freight.

       5 Paraphrased translation from ‘Histoire d’un crime’, 1877.

       6 The actual journey on the opening day, 15 September 1830, attended by the Duke of Wellington and other dignitaries, took a little longer, owing to the fatal accident involving William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool and a great local supporter of the new railway. A frail man who failed to gauge the time it would take for Rocket to travel up the track to where he was standing, he was struck by it as passengers milled around on the track and as the engines took on water midway in the journey. Oh, the symbolism of progress! At the time it was an easy mistake to make.

       7 The disparity was evident northwards of London too: Leeds was 6 minutes and 10 seconds behind London; Carnforth was 11 minutes and 5 seconds behind; Barrow was 12 minutes and 54 seconds.

       8 For some, the helter-skelter of railways represented merely one more unwelcome intrusion of the fast modern world. ‘What with railways, steamships, printing-presses it has surely become a most monstrous “tissue” this life of ours,’ Thomas Carlyle wrote from London to Ralph Waldo Emerson in America in 1835. He was horrified at ‘the roaring Loom of Time’, a reference to Goethe’s Faust. The printing press, it should be acknowledged, was by then 300 years old, and one wonders where the two authors would have been without it.

       9 Or as the proclamation in the Reichstag stated, ‘The legal time in Germany is the solar mean time of the fifteenth degree latitude east of Greenwich.’

       10 Parallel tracks: in the twenty-first century, the lines of ultra-fast fibre-optic cables used for high-frequency trading between, for example, stock exchanges and traders in New York and Chicago, followed the telegraph laid down by the railways some 150 years before.

       11 He was building on the maverick ideas of Professor C.F. Dowd, the principal of Temple Grove Seminary for Young Ladies in Saratoga, New York, who first suggested separating the continent into four or more ‘time belts’.

       12 Before this standardization, the first message transmitted telegraphically some forty miles along the Baltimore to Washington line was ‘What hath God wrought!’

       13 No such delineations in Russia, though: throughout the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway between 1891 and 1916, and despite the great distances involved, the route ran entirely on Moscow’s civil time. The route now spans seven time zones across an eight-day journey.

       14 Quoted in Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America 1865–1900 (New York, 2008) and in Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford, 2000). The latter is especially comprehensive, and has been a useful source for the American details in this chapter.

       15 Those within even touching distance of railway fanaticism, and admirers of Michael Portillo (more now than there used to be), will be aware of Bradshaw’s, the guide that began in England as a pocket-sized timetable in 1839 and soon expanded into a UK railway atlas, a traveller’s guide and a European handbook. It was both infinitely useful and highly accurate, and its popularity obliged railway companies to run punctual trains; the printed timetable dictating the service rather than the other way around.

       16 Many eyewitness accounts suggest punctual Fascist trains were a myth, but there can be no doubting the hitherto unavailable possibilities of synchronised troop movements.

      A revolution in sound: three minutes of bliss from the Beatles.

       Chapter Four

      The Beet Goes On

i) The Way to Play the Ninth

      At 6.45 p.m. on Friday, 7 May 1824, a large crowd gathered at a theatre in the centre of Vienna for the first performance of the greatest piece of music ever written. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, composed in almost total deafness, was a work so radical in form and free in spirit that even those who interpret it almost two centuries later never fail to find within it something revelatory. When the world falls apart or unites, this is the music it reaches for.

      No one could predict this at the time, of course. Since its construction in 1709, the Theater am Kärntnertor had witnessed premieres by Haydn, Mozart and Salieri, and its audience was versed in high opera. The last great work by Beethoven performed at the theatre had been the newly revised version of Fidelio, which was received rapturously, but that was exactly 10 years before. The composer, now aged 53, the state of his finances always precarious, had accepted many commissions from royal courts and publishers in London, Berlin and St Petersburg, had frequently missed his deadlines, and was thought to be overwhelmed not only with work but also with legal battles over the custody of his nephew Karl. Besides, he had developed a reputation for obstinacy and cantankerousness. So there was no reason to expect that Beethoven’s latest work was going to be much more than another worthy milestone, not least since it became known that the piece was long and complex, involving a larger orchestra than usual, with solo singers and a chorus in the finale, and had undergone less than four days’ rehearsal. And there was one more thing. Despite the announcement that the concert was to be conducted by the theatre’s regular maestro Michael Umlauf, assisted by first violin Ignaz Schuppanzigh, it was agreed that Beethoven would also appear onstage for the entire performance, placing his own conductor’s stand next to Umlauf, ostensibly to guide the orchestra in the dynamics of the symphony’s tempo (or as it said in the official announcement of the concert the day before,