and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks 
increase the sheer quantity of human exchange.

     It is not really incongruous, therefore, when Mumford 
associates “the clock and the printing press and the blast 
furnace” as the giant innovations of the Renaissance. The 
clock, as much as the blast furnace, speeded the melting of 
materials and the rise of smooth conformity in the contours of 
social life. Long before the industrial revolution of the later 
eighteenth century, people complained that society had 
become a “prose machine” that whisked them through life at a 
dizzy pace.

     The clock dragged man out of the world of seasonal 
rhythms and recurrence, as effectively as the alphabet had 
released him from the magical resonance of the spoken word