Pumping Time: Geographies of temporal infrastructure in fin-de-siècle Paris

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Once, not so long ago, in the nineteenth-century, having all the public clocks show the same time was a big concern - and problem - for city governments, achievement of which was a source of civic and national pride. The citizens were not that different either; they were ready to pay in order to get the 'true' time in their homes. The most common technologies involved electric systems. There was, however, one odd case, the case of Paris, where time was distributed to the city's public clocks and its citizens' homes through a pneumatic system. It literally was pumped through pipes in the form of compressed air. And this system continued to work for almost half a century, between 1880-1927.But how did it really work? What led to the installation of such a system? Where were the public clocks located and why? Which neighbourhoods did the pneumatic system serve? Where were their factories located? How did the pneumatic time distribution system work, and, above all, how was it maintained? What drove people to pay to get connected to pneumatic time pipes? Why did the city government have this system installed? How did the general public feel about it? And what led to its disappearance?This research addresses these questions through original archival research on the histories and geographies of pneumatic time distribution in Paris from an everyday urban point of view. It focuses on how this technology worked, was used, maintained and talked about. And it refers to all these elements as the city's 'temporal infrastructure'. Therefore, it not only fills a significant research gap by providing the first comprehensive account of this technology, but also proposes a new way of looking at and understanding cities through the prism of temporal infrastructures.This research makes key contributions in three areas:i) Empirical and conceptual contribution to the academic literatures on history of timekeeping and time distribution, urban infrastructures, historical geographies of cities, history of mass consumption, and history of technology;ii) Strengthening partnerships between academic institutions and the third sector (museums, in particular) - both within and outside the UK - through collaborations in research, PhD studentships, and exhibitions; andiii) Developing Royal Holloway as a major international hub for research, collaboration and PhD studentship in the study of temporal infrastructures of cities in a variety of historical periods and geographical contexts.