Photos and sketches show methods and devices for recording the passage of time. The narrator explains Greenwich time, the world's 24 time zones, distortion of time under hypnosis, and chemical reaction time (such as the iodine clock). Demonstrations reveal how photography freezes time, a microscope stops time and magnifies it, and a motion picture speeds or slows time. A film details the process involved in time-lapse photography of both plant movement and crystal growth. Another film shows how atom structures are better represented by soap bubbles, rather than table tennis balls, to show the "slip" within a metal when it's bent. This film segues into another comparing the actions of various detergents and how scientists study fabric fibers under a microscope and within a tiny, transparent washtub. The final film, of a flame, uses the schlieren system to capture a minute segment of the "birth of a flame."