Long before the time of Hannah More, however, the theme of the zealous husbandry of time had ceased to be particular to the Puritan, Wesleyan, or Evangelical traditions. It was Benjamin Franklin, who had a life-long technical interest in clocks and who numbered among his acquaintances John Whitehurst of Derby, the inventor of the "tell-tale" clock, who gave it its most unambiguous secular expression:
Since our Time is reduced to a Standard, and the Bullion of the Day minted out into Hours, the Industrious know how to employ every Piece of Time to a real Advantage in their different Professions: And he that is prodigal of his Hours, is, in effect, a Squanderer of Money. I remember a notable Woman, who was fully sensible of the intrinsic Value of Time. Her Husband was a Shoemaker, and an excellent Craftsman, but never minded how the Minutes passed. In vain did she inculcate to him, That Time is Money. He had too much Wit to apprehend her, and it prov'd his Ruin. When at the Alehouse among his idle Companions, if one remark'd that the Clock struck Eleven, What is that, says he, among us all? If she sent him Word by the Boy, that it had struck Twelve; Tell her to be easy, it can never be more. If, that it had struck One, Bid her be comforted, for it can never be less.
The reminiscence comes directly out of London (one suspects) where Franklin worked as a printer in the 1720s - but never, he reassures us in his Autobiography, following the example of his fellow-workers in keeping Saint Monday. It is, in some sense, appropriate that the ideologist who provided Weber with his central text in illustration of the capitalist ethic should come, not from that Old World, but from the New - the world which was to invent the time-recorder, was to pioneer time-and-motion study, and was to reach its apogee with Henry Ford.
