What TIME is it?!
Over 150 years ago, every community in the United States set its clocks to noon based on when the sun reached its highest position in the sky; as a result, when it was noon in Washington, D.C., it was closer to 12:30 in New York, only 11 in Philadelphia. Before 1883, there were 144 local time zones on record throughout the United States.
Though it seems crazy now, back then, it really wasn’t a big deal. Travel between geographically separated cities wasn’t commonplace, nor was it carried out by means of mass public transport. And, anyways, the small time differences between adjacent towns and cities were not critical when it took days to travel from place to place. In short, the only time that really mattered was the time it was where you were located.
All of that changed with the rise of railroads.
Traveling significant distances became easier and faster than ever before, a multitude of local times, particularly in large countries such as the United States, made things confusing when it came to train schedules. Travelers could sometimes arrive at an earlier local time than the one they had left. More urgently, however, due to this lack of time standardization, schedules on the same tracks often could not be coordinated, which often led to collisions such as the one that occurred in New England in August 1853 when two trains heading towards each other on the same track crashed because the train guards had different times set on their watches. Fourteen people were killed as a result.
Something had to change.
On October 11, 1883, 141 years ago today, railroad executives met in Chicago at the General Time Convention in an attempt to fix the problem.
Charles F. Dowd proposed A System of National Times for Railroads, which involved a single time for railways but the keeping of local times for towns. It was quickly shot down as too confusing. Another man, William Frederick Allen, proposed a much simpler solution of replacing the 50 different railway times with five time zones instead. Although there was opposition (an Indianapolis newspaper protested that people would have to “eat sleep work … and marry by railroad time”), the idea quickly gained the support of nearly all railway companies, most cities, and influential observatories such as Yale and Harvard. As such, “standard railway time” was introduced at noon on November 18, 1883 and was adopted across most of the country. It was incorporated into law in 1918.
Now, I grew up in west central Indiana, and it always confused me that I could drive 30 minutes and suddenly be in a different time zone (Illinois is on central time, Indiana eastern). While I understood that time zones were necessary, the borders seemed arbitrary. And, it turns out, that is because they kind of are.
In principle, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, which took over time regulation once it was adopted into law, every time zone should be exactly 15 degrees of longitude wide. However, individual states and sometimes even counties have the power to decide what time that state, or parts of it, will observe. For example, the line between Eastern and Central time cuts through Kentucky and Tennessee so that it will neatly go between Alabama and Georgia. If it went around the western ends of Kentucky and Tennessee, the sun would be a long way from properly overhead when the time said it was noon. So the result is the odd, seemingly random lines that sometimes split states in two.
So, yes, while time zones have made traveling safer, I wouldn’t exactly say they’ve made things easier, especially if you live in one of these border states.
Take it from someone who is constantly asking, “What TIME is it?!”
