Another Gadget to Give You Time

From calculators to wearables, the history of gadgets is a short history of time itself—and the promise of more of it.

The Apple Watch is only the latest gadget to come along and promise us respite from the frenetic hustle of synced calendars, emails, sexts, and Twitter notifications. With this thing on your wrist, the pitch goes, you'll finally have time to deal with all of these and more.

This is a familiar pitch for gadgets and gizmos throughout history, with the regular intervals of bell-ringing systematized by Benedictine monks in the Middle Ages as the starting point, according to technology theorist Lewis Mumford.

Ever since then—from clock towers in the merchant cities of the 14th century to today's Apple announcement—many gadgets have expressed our own desire for time, that most precious resource, by allowing us to manage it and get more out of it.

In 2015, our attention spans are traded for profit by online marketers. Smartphones and instant communications have made regular work hours more of a suggestion than a rule. The practice of parsing time by the millisecond to get more out of it championed by Frederick Taylor in the late 19th century to discipline factory workers never really seems to have gone away.

So, what are we to make of the Apple Watch, an expensive gadget that will save you time by absorbing all of your other gadgets and putting them on your wrist, where you can't possibly ignore them? Maybe looking at all the ways gadgets have promised us more time over the years can give us a clue.​

The Handheld Calculator

The Sharp EL-8 was one of the first consumer electronic calculators, and it promised to save more time for depressed pencil-pushers than ever. For what? I don't know, ironing pleats in their short sleeved dress shirts? Just look at those towering, haphazard piles of paperwork that open the commercial—my palms are getting clammy just thinking about wading through them, mostly because I'm terrible at math. For the archetypal office drone of the 70s, a portable calculator promised to make soul-crushing paperwork a little quicker to get through.

Apple II

I feel kind of bad for the kid in this commercial because his harrowing fever dreams involve school instead of monsters or being naked in front of his teacher or something—maybe drama at the skate park? Something about soft drinks? I don't know what occupied the mental world of cool teens in the '80s, but this commercial makes it clear that the Apple II will help them save time.

This kid's nightmare is literally running out of time. He's on a deadline that he can't possibly meet. His friends taunt him for having waited until the very last minute—five minutes, to be exact—to finish his history report. He wakes up from this terrible nightmare only to see his Apple II, reminding him that things are much quicker now, and thus more relaxed. Technology injects time where there was none; sums it up almost out of thin air. Go back to bed, Johnny or Jimmy or whatever, you've got a personal computer and all the time in the world.

Xerox Machines

This one's interesting because it references monestary life, which as I mentioned has been credited as the site of timekeeping's origin. But the monks in this commercial are less stoic and more totally wacky and fun. Those rascals! Writing out all those Bible passages by hand takes up a lot of time, and the only way our devout protagonist is going to deliver 500 pages of the stuff before he dies of old age is by copying his original manuscript with a Xerox machine, which can copy at an astounding two pages per second. The head monk declares it a miracle, suggesting that if Jesus saves people, then Xerox saves precious minutes.

Pagers

Pagers are pretty cool, mostly because they were featured so prominently in The Wire, but this ad makes pagers seem cool for another reason: they help you make better use of your free time. Day jobs get in the way of time to be cool with your cool '90s friends, the commercial states, and once you clock out you need to make the most of it. Having a pager lets you find out where the rave is at faster, so you can slip on a tube top and some blue-tinted shades without wasting any time.

IBM ThinkPad

Here's another guy who just can't seem to find enough time in the day—he's got to email a presentation, and his computer won't work. A few chill-ass IT dudes are hanging out and drinking coffee, so he desperately goes and asks them what to do. They let him know how easy ThinkPads are to use, and go on being all chill like IT guys do. The implication is that this sweaty, upset business guy could have more time to hang out and drink coffee like the IT guys with his ThinkPad. "You ever try decaf?" Classic burn.

Palm Pre

This Palm Pre ad is like Ambien or an Enya song in commercial form. It's so relaxing. Right away the commercial tries as hard as it can to convince you that the Pre, Palm's last ditch effort to save itself from eventual bankruptcy, will make your life more relaxing by organizing it. You'll "go with the flow," the ad's otherworldly spokesperson states, as she looks out onto a pastoral nature scene. Time doesn't matter here—it might as well not exist, but really it's just perfectly managed.

Did any of these gadgets really make our lives less hectic, or did they just add more noise? Some definitely did, others maybe not so much. Regardless, the issue of time and the eternal need for more of it is more or less a constant across the history of gadgets, and these are just a few examples. Will the Apple Watch be a time saver, allowing us to do more things, more quickly? Maybe. The only way to tell is to be patient.