Schedules and punctuality: requirements of modernity

(Image: Pixabay CC0) - If timetables and punctuality are an integral part of our society, it has not always been so. This is what Catherine Herr-Laporte, a doctoral student at the Chair in the History of Technology, has shown by studying the development of postal transport in France throughout the 18th century as part of her doctoral thesis on time and mobility. In her work, we discover why speed became a social, political and economic issue. And how temporal coordination contributed to the emergence of a new consciousness of time, the same one that laid the foundations of the modern state . For a long time, the appearance of the railroad in the 19th century was perceived as a revolution in the field of transportation. However, Catherine Herr-Laporte reminds us that speed was already an issue in the 18th century. Benjamin Franklin's adage, ' Time is money ,' was as true then as it is now," she notes.