Galison, Peter Louis. 2003. Einstein's Clocks, Poincar.'s Maps: Empires of Time (NY: W.W. Norton).
Einstein's duties at the patent office included working on the large numbers of patents for electronic systems to synchronize clocks throughout Europe in order to organize the railroad system. The military also put great stock in synchronization.
Synchronization also appealed to people who associated it with modernization and were appalled by anarchy of any sort -- including political anarchy. Ironically, anarchism was popular among the Swiss clockmakers.
23-4: "By the century's end physicists were making precision measurements of light -- staggeringly accurate attempts to detect the elusive ether; they were refining work in electricity and magnetism to dissect the behavior of the newly accepted electron. All this led many of the leading physicists (not just Einstein and Poincare) to consider the problem of an electrodynamics of moving bodies to be one of the most difficult, fundamental, and acute problems on the scientific agenda."
24: "In the years that followed [1910], it became canonical for both philosophers and physicists to hail clock synchronization as a triumph in both disciplines, a beacon of modern thought."
30: By the 1830s, inventors were constructing electrical distribution systems to find numerous far-flung clocks to a single central clock. Leipzig was the first city to install such a system. Frankfurt followed in 1859.
32-3: In 1898, Poincare published an article, "The Measure of Time," which argued against Bergson, who claimed that we have an intuitive understanding of time. Poincare argued that simultaneity was merely a convention that maximized human convenience.
34: Clock coordination was the subject of one of Einstein's favorite childhood books
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com