100 Objects #15: Bundy Clock
Summary
This episode explores how Willard Bundy’s invention of the employee time clock and Frederick Taylor’s scientific management revolutionized workplace surveillance. By mechanizing time tracking, these innovations shifted power from workers to employers, enforcing strict efficiency and creating the modern middle manager. The story highlights the resulting labor conflicts, such as the Watertown Arsenal strike, and traces how this culture of timed productivity eventually permeated society, turning self-regulation into a moral imperative.
Topics discussed
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Introduction to the history of timekeeping in colonial America
Town clocks and the mistrust of factory time
Willard Bundy: The inventor who loved order
The 'Wonderful Clock' and Bundy's engineering genius
Invention of the first employee time clock
Harlow Bundy and the failed marketing strategy
Aggressive advertising and the rise of surveillance
Punctuality as a moral virtue and worker resistance
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Frederick Taylor: The obsessive efficiency expert
Time studies, standard times, and worker exploitation
Taylorism, disciples, and the mechanization of labor
Clock warfare at Watertown Arsenal
Taylorism spreads to homes and the 'happiness minutes'
The internalization of work ethic and self-surveillance
The Bundy brothers' feud and the birth of IBM
Credits and Eglis eczema medication advertisement
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