How the Railroads Changed Time Keeping
How the Railroads Changed Time Keeping
As it happens to everyone, I stumbled upon a random YouTube video. The video, which was a commercial to a PBS Documentary “How we got to now” discussed the idea that the United States at one time, had hundreds of different time zones. Each one not different by the hour but by the minute, because every town and city changed their time based on a reading of the sun. The advancement of the railroad system in the late 1800's changed everything and created the international centralized time zone system that we use today. After seeing that video I was hooked. It was right in my wheelhouse in terms significant historical triviality. How did we centralize time in the United States? How and why did the Railroad cause things to change so drastically? Did the rest of the world not have a central system like the United States?
So lets get this out of the way. In the 19th century there wasn’t a global standardized method of keeping time. Before GMT or Greenwich Mean Time everyone used the sun to keep time locally. GMT is the “mean” solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. Today the international standard is UTC or Coordinated Standard Time. This standard is based on the Earth’s Rotation, International Atomic Time, and The International Telecommunications Union. However with all that regulation it is still only one second off on average from GMT, which again is based on the sun. GMT and UTC are considered to be interchangeable and equivalent. GMT became the standard in Great Britain in the 1840’s for two main reasons. Maritime navigation and the British railway. This was the first example of a railway necessitating the unification of time.
Americans on the other hand didn’t like the idea of centralized time. For example in Michigan, when time did eventually become centralized in 1884, "Detroit kept local time, when the City Council decreed that clocks should be put back 28 minutes to Central Standard Time. Half the city obeyed, while half refused. After a long debate, the decision was rescinded and the city reverted to sun time. In 1905, Central Standard Time was adopted by city vote.” This just shows how stubborn cities were in the United States. Everything was done on a local level up to and including each town keeping their time according to their sun dial. Which in turn was set on clock towers, churches, and town halls. That was the closest the US got to centralized time in the 1800’s. The Railroad forced everyone to unite.
How did the Railroads Centralize Time Globally?
Because there was such a wide array of times zones throughout the US, and everyones watch being off sometimes by up to a half hour. It was not only becoming inconvenient but extremely dangerous. If an engineer was a half hour early or half hour late this could lead to devastating accidents. Besides that, people would miss trains, deliveries would be affected because of constant delays, and as a result the railroads would lose money, large companies would lose money, big steel and big oil would lose money, and then the banks would lose money. What causes big change quickly? Thats right, rich people losing money. In 1883, the Railroads decided that they would divide the country into four time zones. A year later, in 1884, this was officially adopted by the world. The proposal from the Americans was, “to divide the world into 24 time zones with one-hour gaps based on Greenwich Mean Time as a world standard time, with a meridian intersecting Greenwich set at zero.” The four time zones of America were approved as standard time zones at the International Meridian Conference, and the system was approved. This standardization took time to take hold across the United States. A lot of “we are not gonna be told what time it is by the BRITISH!” Was most likely a common refrain. All kidding aside it took until the 1920’s for “railroad time” to be completely adopted by the United States. If people wanted to get around via train there was only one time to go by, so eventually everyone had to switch.
Railroad companies were so important and so powerful that they were able to unite the world to create a standardized means of telling time. Now its interesting to note, that astronomers and other scientists all over the globe were fighting to create centralized times. Scientists in the United States were proposing time meridians for the United States as far back as 1809. The expansion and advancement of transportation on both the sea and rail are responsible for creating a unified time system. We have advanced chronometers, smartphones, satellites, quartz movements, apple watches, and bedside clock radios. What I find most fascinating, is that even with all that technology. Even though we all work off a unified system of telling time, ultimately we still use the sun to determine what time it is.
