Britain was the first country to set the time throughout a region to one standard time. The railways cared most about the inconsistencies of local mean time, and they forced a uniform time on the country. The original idea was credited to Dr. Other railways followed suit, and by most though not all railways used London time. The last major holdout was the legal system, which stubbornly stuck to local time for many years, leading to oddities like polls opening at and closing at Standard time in time zones was instituted in the U.
Prior to that, time of day was a local matter, and most cities and towns used some form of local solar time, maintained by a well-known clock on a church steeple, for example, or in a jeweler's window.
The new standard time system was not immediately embraced by all, however. The train at right is a Union locomotive used during the American Civil War, photo ca. The first man in the United States to sense the growing need for time standardization was an amateur astronomer, William Lambert, who as early as presented to Congress a recommendation for the establishment of time meridians.
It was displayed by town clocks and was useful for civil government and to anyone needing to synchronize a watch. Railroads ran on the time kept in the city where the line originated. Travelers by train would be synchronized with local time at only one point in their journey. In the late s, New England railroads began publishing monthly schedules, which they called timetables, to coordinate time between train lines.
Eighty different timetables were in use in the U. The British had already addressed the issue of railway time in , using the meridian of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, hence Greenwich Mean Time. The smaller size of England made the problem easier to resolve since it required only one time zone. By the s, ascertaining the time for connections between trainlines was complicated. In the late s, Charles Ferdinand Dowd developed the first comprehensive, practical plan for time standardization in the United States.
He was not a railroad man, but he developed his interest in timetables and time standards as a teacher posing a problem to his students. In , he wrote his first standard for Railway Time. Dowd's original concept was to create one time zone, like Great Britain, using Washington, D.
Since the railroads were at the heart of commerce, their needs were often given primacy, but no one at that time would accept the radical idea of changing local time. Dowd recommended that cities and towns could use their local time and railroads would use Railway Time. With this plan, any locale would only have two time standards to reconcile.
In order to simplify the matter further, translation tables between the two times could be issued regularly and sold as a pamphlet or gazette. However, with the joining of the country by the transcontinental railroad and the lengthening of other rail lines, Dowd soon realized that the difference in local time for a single train line could be enormous.
The shift from an almost indeterminable time to the micromanagement we experience today happened gradually. At first, towns would have their local time and their railroad time. One bartender who claimed to adhere to solar time kept his bar open past 11 p. When he was questioned about breaking the law, he stated that he had 6 minutes to close the bar according to the time that he followed. Many Westerners felt that globalization required more accurate and predictable ways of measuring time.
Timekeeping was a messy and bewildering business in most parts of the 19th-century world. American railways recognized 75 different local times in ; three of those were in Chicago alone. In Germany, travellers had to clarify whether departures were according to Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Ludwigshafen, or Frankfurt time.
By the end of the century, this maddening variety of competing local times was making it difficult to transport everything from spices to armies. Clashing calendars made the headaches even worse. Until revolutionaries jettisoned the Julian calendar in , Russia was 13 days behind western Europe.
Islamic societies counted years from C. This was the dream articulated by Scottish-Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming and officially adopted by diplomats at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D. Calendar reform was no less critical. Simply extending the Gregorian calendar worldwide was one option.
Many subscribed to a design first articulated by the French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte: a perfectly rationalized calendar year of 13 equal months with 28 days each.
Major firms like Sears and Kodak had been doing their internal accounting this way for years, but it proved a hard sell. Overall, time reformers were remarkably successful at bending the world to their will. But it was a hard-won achievement. Around the globe, local populations resented European meddling with their everyday lives and traditional rhythms. The citizens of Bombay openly revolted. In late Ottoman Beirut, colorful and cosmopolitan, locals cheerfully acknowledged new ways of measuring time without relinquishing the old.
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