Before the whistle, workers arrived when the sun told them to.
The factory bell and, later, the steam whistle were among the earliest instruments of industrial time discipline, appearing in English textile mills in the late eighteenth century as factory owners sought to impose uniform start and stop times on workers who had previously organized their labor around daylight, seasons, and the rhythms of agricultural life.1
Historian E.P. Thompson documented the transition from "task orientation," in which people worked until a job was done, to "time discipline," in which work was measured by hours on a clock. The factory bell was the physical enforcement mechanism of that transition.1
Early mill owners stationed clock-keepers at factory gates to record arrivals. Workers who arrived after the bell were docked pay or locked out for the morning. The bell governed not just when work started but when meals could be taken and when the day ended.2
Steam whistles replaced bells in larger factories because they could be heard across greater distances, summoning workers from surrounding neighborhoods. In mill towns, the whistle became the dominant sound of daily life.
The practice was not limited to England. In the American textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, bells dictated every transition of the day for the young women who worked the looms. A bell woke them in their boarding houses, a bell signaled the start of work, a bell released them for meals.3
E.P. Thompson argued in his landmark 1967 essay "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" that the shift from task time to clock time was not merely economic but psychological, producing an entirely new relationship between human beings and their experience of the day.1