The Steampunk Clocks of 19th-Century Paris: Discover the Ingenious System That Revolutionized Timekeeping in the 1880s

A mid­dle-class Parisian liv­ing around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry would have to bud­get for ser­vices like not just water or gas, but also time. Though elec­tric clocks had been demon­strat­ed, they were still a high-tech rar­i­ty; installing one in the home would have been com­plete­ly out of the ques­tion. If you want­ed to syn­chro­nize time­keep­ing across an entire major city, it made more sense to use a proven, reli­able, and much cheap­er infra­struc­ture: pipes full of com­pressed air. Paris’ pneu­mat­ic postal sys­tem had been in ser­vice since 1866, and in 1877, Vien­na had demon­strat­ed that the same basic tech­nol­o­gy could be used to run clocks.

“The idea was to have a mas­ter clock in the cen­ter of Paris that would send out a pulse each minute to syn­chro­nize every clock around the city,” writes Ewan Cun­ning­ham at Pri­mal Neb­u­la, on a com­pan­ion page to the Pri­mal Space video above.

“The clocks wouldn’t have to be pow­ered, the bursts of air would sim­ply move all the clocks in the sys­tem for­ward at the same time. As for the mas­ter clock itself, it was kept in time by “anoth­er super accu­rate clock that was updat­ed dai­ly using obser­va­tions of stars and plan­ets” at the Paris Obser­va­to­ry. Just five years after its first imple­men­ta­tion in 1880, this sys­tem had made pos­si­ble the instal­la­tion of thou­sands of “Popp clocks” (named for its Aus­tri­an inven­tor Vic­tor Popp) in “hotels, train sta­tions, hous­es, schools and pub­lic streets.”

In 1881, the vis­it­ing engi­neer Jules Albert Berly wrote of these “numer­ous clocks stand­ing on grace­ful light iron pil­lars in the squares, at the cor­ners of streets, and in oth­er con­spic­u­ous posi­tions about the city,” also not­ing those “through­out their hotels were, what is unusu­al with hotel clocks, keep­ing accu­rate time.” Apart from the great flood of 1910, which “stopped time” across Paris, this pneu­mat­ic time-keep­ing sys­tem seems to have remained in steady ser­vice for near­ly half a cen­tu­ry, until its dis­con­tin­u­a­tion in 1927. But even now, near­ly a cen­tu­ry late, some of the sites where Popp clocks once stood are still iden­ti­fi­able — and thus wor­thy sites of pil­grim­age for steam­punk fans every­where.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

How Big Ben Works: A Detailed Look Inside London’s Beloved Vic­to­ri­an Clock Tow­er

The Clock That Changed the World: How John Harrison’s Portable Clock Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Sea Nav­i­ga­tion in the 18th Cen­tu­ry

Clocks Around the World: How Oth­er Lan­guages Tell Time

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.