Middle-class Parisians living in the early 20th century had to budget not only for water and gas, but also for services like time. Electric clocks were available, but they were still a rare high-tech product and were completely unthinkable to install in the home. If you wanted to synchronize time across a major city, it made more sense to use a proven, reliable and much cheaper infrastructure: pipes filled with compressed air. Paris’ pneumatic postal system had been in operation since 1866, and by 1877 Vienna had demonstrated that the same basic technology could be used to run clocks.
“The idea was to have a master clock in the center of Paris that would send out a pulse every minute to synchronize all the clocks in the city.” Article written by Ewan Cunningham of Primal NebulaOn related pages Primal Space video above.
“The clocks didn’t need to be powered – just a blast of air would make all the clocks in the system advance simultaneously. The master clock itself was kept time by “another ultra-high accuracy clock, which was updated daily using observations of the stars and planets” at the Paris Observatory. Just five years after its first implementation in 1880, the system made it possible to install thousands of “Popp clocks” (named after its Austrian inventor Victor Popp) in “hotels, train stations, houses, schools and public roads.”
In 1881, Visiting engineer Jules Albert Berly wrote: The Pop Clocks were “numerous clocks standing on graceful light iron poles in squares, street corners, and other prominent places in the city,” and, unusually for hotel clocks, “the clocks throughout the hotel kept accurate time,” the article noted. Apart from the great flood of 1910, when “time stopped” throughout Paris, the pneumatic timekeeping system appears to have functioned reliably for nearly half a century before being abandoned in 1927. But even after nearly a century, some of the sites where the Pop Clocks once stood are still identifiable, making them worthy sites of pilgrimage for steampunk fans around the world.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
