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Atlas Shrugged Chronology

The table below reconstructs the events of Atlas Shrugged as a sequential chronology. I have fixed my timeline using a comment at the beginning of the book Who Is Ayn Rand?: "[O]n an evening twelve years from tonight, the people of the United States are ... waiting to hear a broadcast by the head of their government -- Mr. Thompson." Since Who Is Ayn Rand? was published in 1962, this would mean that John Galt's interruption of Mr. Thompson would occur in 1974. I have based the rest of the timeline around this date.

Notes

I want to acknowledge the efforts of Hans Schantz, whose earlier work in developing an Atlas Shrugged timeline inspired this one. His was offline for some years, but he has now posted an updated version of his timeline. Note that because he makes some different assumptions (most significantly basing his timeline around different "start date" for the novel), so his specific dates will be different, but the overall timing is similar.

Page references are taken from The Objectivism Research CD-ROM, which includes the text of Atlas Shrugged along with other works by Rand.

The following specific citations were used to build the chronology:

89-90 - "Sebastián d'Anconia, his ancestor, had left Spain many centuries ago, at a time when Spain was the most powerful country on earth [...] and he sailed to a new world." The exact time period is not specified, but c. 1600 would be appropriate on the assumption that the past of Atlas Shrugged is generally similar to that of the real world, in this case specifically in regard to the time period "when Spain was the most powerful country on earth."

90 - "Fifteen years after he left Spain, Sebastián d'Anconia sent for the girl he loved; she had waited for him."

62 - "Nathaniel Taggart had been a penniless adventurer who had come from somewhere in New England and built a railroad across a continent, in the days of the first steel rails." Again using the assumption of historical similarity between the real world and the novel's world, the first steel rails were in 1857, so c. 1860 seems appropriate for Nat Taggart's venture. In the real world, the first transcontinental railroad wasn't completed until 1869, but with the introduction of the Taggart family we are moving away from reality and into the world of the novel, so some divergence at this point is acceptable.

156 - "The bridge, twelve hundred feet of steel across the black gap, was built in the days of Nat Taggart's son." Again the exact date is unspecified, so I determined a reasonable date based on interpolating this event between Nat Taggart's original construction of the railroad and the later building of the Colorado tunnel by his grandson.

581 - "Then have them get for me out of the files the old maps of our road as it was before Nat Taggart's grandson built the tunnel." Placing this event, along with the prior event of Nat Taggart's son building the bridge, are two of the more difficult questions of Atlas Shrugged chronology. Dagny is speaking in the passage quoted, and presumably she would not refer to her own father or grandfather as "Nat Taggart's grandson." Based on all the above, I developed some reasonable estimates for the Taggart family timeline:

• Birth of Nat Taggart: 1820
• Birth of Nat Taggart's son: 1840
• Birth of Nat Taggart's grandson: 1862
• Birth of Dagny Taggart's grandfather: 1885
• Birth of Dagny Taggart's father: 1908

Using these dates, Nat Taggart would have built his railroad around the age of 40, his son and grandson would have worked on their projects during their late 30s, and each generation would have been in their 20s when their children were born. "Nat Taggart's grandson" would be Dagny's great-grandfather (or perhaps her great-grandfather's brother or cousin), but not someone she would have known personally.

43 - "He was fifty-three years old." With this and all other birth dates, the absence of specific birthday information in the text means these dates could slip by a year.

176 -- "He did not look like a man in his early fifties [...]." Because Stadler's age is never given precisely, the date for his birth and the dates for other early activities in his life (his treatise on cosmic rays, etc.) cannot be pinned down exactly. Once his story intersects with other characters, the timeline becomes more precise.

69-70 -- "He was forty-three years old and it was the opening night of Phaëthon, an opera he had written at the age of twenty-four. [...] The opera had been performed then, nineteen years ago, and had closed after one performance [...] On the night when the opera was presented again, nineteen years later, the last sounds of the music crashed into the sounds of the greatest ovation the opera house had ever heard. [...] It was eight years ago; no one had seen him since."

78 -- "Dan Conway was approaching fifty." As with Robert Stadler, the absence of a precise age leaves some uncertainty as to the birth year in this case.

34 -- "His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them; this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five."

Additional keywords: Ann Rand, Anne Rand, Ayn Rad, Ayn Ran, Any Rand, Atlas Shrugged by Ann Rand, Alas Shrugged, Atlas Shugged, Atlas Shruged

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