From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   It took Dearborn's purchasing agents some effort to find a factory whistle   
   that wouldn't rust from the jungle humidity. Once they did, they shipped it to   
   Fordlandia, where it was perched on top of the water tower, above the tall   
   trees, giving it a seven-   
   mile range. The whistle was piercing enough not only to reach dispersed road   
   gangs and fieldhands but to be heard across the river, where even those not   
   affiliated with Fordlandia began to pace their day to its regularly scheduled   
   blows. The whistle was    
   supplemented by another icon of industrial factory work: pendulum punch time   
   clocks, placed at different locations around the plantation, that recorded   
   exactly when each employee began and ended his workday.   
      
   In Detroit, immigrant workers by the time they got to Ford's factories, even   
   if they were peasants and shepherds, had had ample opportunity to adjust to   
   the meter of industrial life. The long lines at Ellis Island, the clocks that   
   hung on the walls of    
   depots and waiting rooms, the fairly precise schedules of ships and trains,   
   and standardized time that chopped the sun's daily arc into zones combined to   
   guide their motions and change their inner sense of how the days passed.   
      
   But in the Amazon, the transition between agricultural time and industrial   
   time was much more precipitous. Prior to showing up at Fordlandia, many of the   
   plantation's workers who had lived in the region had set their pace by two   
   distinct yet    
   complementary timepieces. The first was the sun, its rise and fall marking the   
   beginning and end of the day, its apex signaling the time to take to the shade   
   and sleep. The second was the turn of the seasons: most of the labor needed to   
   survive was    
   performed during the relatively dry months of June to November. Rainless days   
   made rubber tapping possible, while the recession of the floods exposed newly   
   enriched soils, ready to plant, and concentrated fish, making them easier to   
   catch. But nothing    
   was set in stone. Excessive rain or prolonged periods of drought or heat led   
   to adjustments of schedules. Before the coming of Ford, Tapajos workers lived   
   time, they didn't measure it — most rarely ever heard church bells, much   
   less a factory whistle.    
   It was difficult, therefore, as David Riker, who performed many jobs for Ford,   
   including labor recruiter, said, "to make 365-day machines out of these   
   people."   
      
   In 1927, Henry Ford bought a tract of land stretching twice the size of   
   Deleware in the Amazonian jungle of Brazil. Fordlandia, as it was called, was   
   meant to be a large rubber plantation.     
      
   Fordlandia's managers and foremen, in contrast, were mostly engineers, precise   
   in their measurement of time and motion. One of the first things the Americans   
   did was set their watches and clocks to Detroit time, where Fordlandia remains   
   to this day (   
   nearby Santarem runs an hour earlier). They scratched their heads when   
   confronted with workers they routinely described as "lazy." Archie Weeks's   
   daughter remembers her father throwing his straw hat on the ground more than   
   once in frustration. With a    
   decided sense of purpose that grated against the established rhythms of   
   Tapajos life (David Riker liked to say that hurry was an "obscene" word in the   
   valley), proudly affiliated with a company renowned for its vanguard   
   interlocking efficiency, Ford's    
   men tended to treat Brazilians as instruments. And called them such. Matt   
   Mulrooney gave his workers nicknames. "This fellow I had named Telephone. When   
   I wanted to send a message or an order down front, I'd just holler,   
   'Telephone!' and he'd show up."   
      
   And they used themselves as standards to measure the value of Brazilian labor.   
   "Two of our people easily carried some timbers which twelve Brazilians did not   
   seem to be able to handle," observed a Dearborn official at the end of 1930.   
   What a man could do    
   in a Dearborn day "would take one of them guys three days to do it down there."   
      
   These American managers and foremen did, after all, work for a man whose   
   obsession with time long predated his drive to root out "lost motion" and   
   "slack" in the workday by dividing the labor needed to build the Model T into   
   ever smaller tasks: 7,882 to    
   be exact, according to Ford's own calculations. As a boy, Ford regularly took   
   apart and reassembled watches and clocks. "Every clock in the Ford home," a   
   neighbor once recalled, "shuddered when it saw him coming." He even invented a   
   two-faced watch, one    
   to keep "sun time" and the other Chicago time — that is, central standard   
   time. Thirteen when his mother died giving birth to her ninth child, Henry   
   later described his home after her passing as "a watch without a mainspring."   
      
   He also knew that attempts to change the measure of time could lead to   
   resistance — again, well before he met labor opposition to his assembly line   
   speedup. He was twenty-two when, in 1885, most of Detroit refused to obey a   
   municipal ordinance to    
   promote the "unification of time," as the campaign to get the United States to   
   accept the Greenwich meridian as the universal standard was called.   
   "Considerable confusion" prevailed, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, as   
   Detroit "showed her usual    
   conservatism in refusing to adopt Standard Time." It took more than two   
   decades to get the city to fully "abandon solar time" and set its clocks back   
   twenty-eight minutes and fifty-one seconds to harmonize with Chicago and the   
   rest of the Midwest (the    
   city would switch to eastern standard time in 1915, both to have more sunlight   
   hours and to synchronize the city's factories with New York banks).   
      
      
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