ABSTRACT
A few weeks after Severalls, Essex County Council's second lunatic asylum, opened its doors in May 1913, the first radio signal was beamed across the world from the Eiffel Tower. A symbol and portent of impending collapse of earlier notions of space and time, it established world time and would also make the earth a 'global village'. In that same year, Henry Ford began the first assembly-line production of cars, heralding both massproduction on a huge scale and a revolution in transport. Just over one year later, the First World War would shatter old beliefs about madness and psychiatry, religion, nation, gender. Prior to this, of course, myriad changes had already come about and were still in process, but the rate of change varied enormously, and though the industrial world had long been ruled by the invariant measure of clocks, it could still be said that in some areas of the world, particularly remote areas, different ways of experiencing time still existed.
