Steve Schmitz has spent most weekday mornings during the past 12 years resetting the Foucault pendulum at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
Every morning, he jumps the waist-high barrier, grabs the pendulum and releases it from the north-northwest quadrant of the circle. Then he sits on the ground and, in silence, sets up the wooden pegs the pendulum knocked down the day before.
"It's hypnotic," Schmitz says, then launches into a discussion on time: How it goes too fast. How there's never enough of it.
"I didn't think that way," he explains, "until I started advancing in age."
Today is the quadrennial correction known as Leap Day, a reminder of how imperfect our concept of time is — and how obsessed we are with it.
In 1851, the French scientist Leon Foucault used a pendulum as physical proof of Earth's rotation. A model of the pendulum was built here in the 1980s. Every time the reflective ball sways across the floor of the museum, it creates an oval orbit. Every seven to 12 minutes, it knocks down one of the wooden pegs arranged in a circle. After 24 hours, it has knocked down all the pegs.
Caroline Sumners, the museum's vice president for astronomy and the physical sciences, says visitors often stare at the pendulum until they see a pin fall.
"I don't know why people will stare at this for 12 minutes," she says.
Sumners looks down at the pendulum, golden, shiny, graceful. It makes one more orbit, smashes into a pin. The sound, an echoed thud across the paleontology hall, is more dramatic, perhaps, than the hit itself.
"Maybe because it's cosmic," she says, "because it's inevitable."
The first solar calendar emerged in ancient Egypt, out of necessity — to predict the ideal time to plant crops. But Michael Kearl, a Trinity University professor of sociology and anthropology working on a book about time, says humans really start keeping time in the womb.
"Fetuses move to the tempo of the mother's speech," he says. "They are already doing the cultural dance."
He believes time has never been as important as now.
Until the 1880s, people in the United States set their watches by the sun. When the sun was straight ahead, they would set their watches to noon. But when cities had to be in synch for train schedules, the United States moved to standard time.
Today, says Kearl, that need to be in synch is magnified: Part of the language in the North American Free Trade Agreement is that Mexico move to standard time; if you're a commodities broker doing business in Japan, you'll be working Sunday before the sun rises. In Peru and Equador there are campaigns about punctuality.
Kearl says anthropologists have found that people in larger cities walk faster and their timepieces tend to be more accurate.
"The United States, especially is time obsessed," he says "It was Ben Franklin who said, 'Time is money.' "
But besides the business and monetary side of things, Kearl says humans are probably the only creatures aware of their mortality.
"With that knowledge life becomes scarce," he says.
But something might be happening as our timepieces change. An hourglass, he says, is a perfect representation that time ends for all of us. In his generation, analog wristwatches represented the circular nature of time, and even the ticking of the clock reminded them that time was passing by.
But what about now, when digital clocks break down time to the second, when most people use a cell phone to tell time. What does that say about our relationship with time, perhaps even, our relationship with our own mortality?
Homero Capetillo has spent some 40 years working on timepieces. His diploma in horology hangs at the entrance of his Bellaire shop, Mr. C's Watch, Clock & Jewelry Repair. The ticks and tocks coming from the hundreds of clocks create a cacophonous chorus of time.
His 20-year-old son, Homero Capetillo II, points at the big grandfather clocks, his favorite, and the smaller, less sophisticated one that is set perfectly to official U.S. time.
Their house is the same: two grandfather clocks, two cuckoo clocks, two mantle clocks, four battery clocks and one that keeps time with marbles.
"Some people ask, 'How do you sleep at night with all this noise?' " the younger Capetillo says.
His father thinks time is golden. "It's the most important thing," he says.
And since the introduction of the quartz watch in the '70s, time has been precise.
"Some people don't know that a cheap quartz watch is a better timekeeper than a Rolex," said Capetillo. His favorite, though, is a Bulova Accutron, the first battery-operated watch introduced in the United States.
Capetillo walks to his work room. He looks in a drawer and pulls out an Accutron. It's lightweight and has a transparent face that shows its inner workings.
Those watches, he says, are the hardest to work on. They're also unreliable.
"If you place them face down, they lose two minutes a day. If you place them sideways, they'll gain two minutes a day."
"It's imperfect," says Capetillo, and he likes that. It's the reason the Accutron still holds his heart.
Life, after all, is imperfect.
