ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of racing against a set time has given way to the practice of timing competitors over a set distance, a change that necessitated the introduction and development of the stopwatch. Sports timing began with the idea of racing against a set time, rather than timing a set distance. The timing of races and of sports achievement in general, is a modern phenomenon, one with a history less than three hundred years old. It could be argued, of course, that the technology required to time a race is itself less than three centuries of age, but such an argument ignores the motivation behind the modern interest in the timing and recording of competitive sports. The idea of the sports "record"-a word first used in its modern sense in the early 1880s-has a strong correla-tive in the doctrine of progressivism: records had to be established, because records had to be beaten, ad infinitum.
