Open Culture's Journal

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.

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.