ABSTRACT
The construction of scientific and popular narratives about notions of time reached a highpoint during the modernist period, and especially so during the interwar years. Scientific and philosophical discourses around the nature of time were irreversibly influenced by a variety of innovations such as Einstein’s theories of relativity, which had accumulated in the public domain by 1919. Einstein’s theories were based on the supposition that time, space and distance are not absolute, and that their definition is relative and relational to context and observer. Such theories caused a seismic shift in the ways people thought about time and the individual’s relation to the world and in turn the world’s relationship to the universe. Others had similarly begun to
investigate the relationship between time and motion as a means of assessing working processes and increasing industrial productivity: thus Taylorism, derived from the theories of F.W. Taylor based on time and motion studies in the workplace, became the basic tenet of mass production within industry, in which the production of goods was unimaginably increased by the introduction of the conveyor belt and the assembly line (see for example Taylor 1911). Charlie Chaplin, much admired by Priestley, famously deconstructed the effect of such ‘mass’ theories and working practices on the individual in his wonderfully insightful film Modern Times (1936).
