Arts & Culture
Oh, oh, oh!
Published 20 December 1999
Design - Hugh Aldersey-Williams ponders on nothing (and nought)
Many's the film that relies upon a needle creeping round a dial to give suspense a visible edge. Where would James Bond be without a second hand somewhere, counting down to world disaster? And in Speed our tension is focused on the speedometer. But in our safer, real lives there is the slow magic of the odometer roll-over. What child does not crane from the back seat of its parents' car to witness this little epiphany after 100 or 1,000 miles?
Alas, this innocent pleasure is being stolen from us, like so many things, by the march of digital technology. (Even the Bond films have foolishly succumbed to the computer's tarty allure, rejecting the honest drama of the analogue.) Car mileage is now shown in figures on an electronic display rather than a set of geared tumblers numbered in white on black around their circumference from 0 to 9.
No longer will the numbers roll on, majestically but inexorably, towards who knows what destiny. They'll just flip insignificantly in their sullen green glow. I say "inexorably": any driver could slow down to prolong the moment or even stop and forestall it completely, but nobody ever does. We are in thrall to the ecstasy of progress.
Who could reject the gently revolving odometer? It is more truthful to the reality that it represents than any digital display. But it also offers a metaphysical commentary as it turns. There is none of the obvious excitement of watching lottery balls drop. In the certainty of which numbers will come up lies an altogether more subtle pleasure. For while the odometer is no digital instrument, neither is it not truly analogue. Numbers roll into view but also click into place - in most models, the tumbler recording fractions of a mile rotates continuously, but the tumblers for units, tens, hundreds and so on are engaged by the mechanism only when the time comes for a 0 to displace a 9. An event is conjured out of a featureless continuum. The same effect is more pronounced on old-fashioned clocks where the minute hand advances not continuously, but in a ponderous, though infinitely poised, mechanical choreography that begins with a wheezing build-up and ends with a juddering halt before stillness is resumed for another 50 or so seconds. The passage of time has been bent out of shape by a gravity of our own design. We are Einsteins at the wheel, masters not only of our machines but, momentarily, of time itself.
The same discontinuity is observed in the otherwise linear relation between the price and the value of things at the roll-over between one pound and the next. There is the base lure of saving a penny and appearing to save a pound employed for everything from electrical goods (£199.99) to property (£199,950), where a materially insignificant one part in a few thousand gains enormous psychological value. In some product categories, a reverse psychology has begun to apply. Here, we are taken as understanding that no real saving is represented by this 99 business, and, this being the case, wouldn't we prefer not to be patronised and pay the round figure? There is a complicity here. The retailer recognises us as the mature, flush citizen we undoubtedly are, and we respond by purchasing the item in question with largesse. It applies in smart, metropolitan restaurants, but not at your local Sizzler. It is de rigueur for fashion clothing. Even Marks & Spencer, which once priced clothes at a penny below the pound, now signifies its aspirations with round-pound prices. Books that can expect to attract readers of a certain intellectual maturity are priced to the pound. But the latest Jeffrey Archer will always be £16.99. Not a penny more. We have chosen the zero, 0, as our symbol of this shiver in continuity. The zero's special shape graphically encapsulates a void. (In Arabic, the symbol for zero, with equal but different logic, is a dot, enclosing nothing.) In its repetitions, -00, -000, on price tags and meters, the 0 does not only signify nothing, but also great magnification. Nothing is not what comes of nothing when zeros pile up.
Instead, there is magnification upon magnification, each zero acting like the rings of a telescope. When we speak of "adding a few zeros" to a figure - typically, salaries and house prices - it's our jokey way of recognising simultaneous nothingness and the vastness of the sums involved. When we marvel at foreign banknotes with strings of noughts on them we merely remind ourselves of the artificiality of money.
The unmathematical Romans famously had no zero, but their number system produces its own roll-over magic (although it would be a challenge to design the meter that could show it). As the year MM dawns, there is a sense of cleansing, and the chance to throw out the jumble of the spent year, MCMXCIX.
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