Time, Freedom and Control – The Legacy of Johannes Bürk @ the Uhrenindustriemuseum Villingen-Schwenningen
On May 14th 2019 the European Court of Justice ruled that all employers are required “to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured.” 1
On July 15th 1855 Johannes Bürk was granted a patent for just such a system.
A system which, as the Uhrenindustriemuseum Villingen-Schwenningen’s exhibition Time, Freedom and Control – The Legacy of Johannes Bürk explains, paved the way, certainly in spirit, for many of the developments in terms of recording, monitoring and managing time which not only developed in the course of the industrialisation of the late 19th/early 20th century, but were imperative to industrialisation’s success.
And which continue to inform and define our post-industrial society.
