New inventions inspired freer, more flexible ways to experience and think about time. The automobile, for example, released people from train and streetcar schedules. And electric lights added hours to the day. Moving pictures, the phonograph, and even the telephone seemed to alter the relationship between past, present, and future. Meanwhile, scientists pursued the notion that time itself was relative.

Sheet music, 1911 Courtesy of NMAH Archives Center, DeVincent Collection		Advertisement, February 1924; from House and Garden Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Playing with Time
Early movies were shorts with no plots. For comic or dramatic effect, filmmakers and projectionists relied on the ability of the film to speed up, slow down, reverse, and stop time. By 1903, moviemakers began to tell stories. Segments of real time were cut up and rearranged to produce a compressed reel-time experience.

Projector, patented 1901; by Vitascope Gift of Thomas Armat		Projectionist, 1898; from Animated Pictures by C. Francis Jenkins

	Telephone, about 1920 Gift of Meggers Collection

The Here and Now
As the turn of the 20th century approached, people were preoccupied with the subject of time. Intellectuals and artists pondered the nature of time itself—especially the concept of "simultaneity" and the definition of "now." What did now mean if a phonograph could capture a moment, bringing the past to the present and the present to the future? Was now freed from place if the telephone enabled two distant persons to experience the same moment? How long was now if a painting depicted movement through time?