What was railroad time

Local jewelers synchronized their customers' watches to local solar noon. In a small town with one jeweler, everyone might use the same time settings. In a large city, the many jewelers' various observations might diverge by several minutes.

Some places achieved citywide synchronization by dropping a time ball on a highly visible tower at noon every day. It worked better than ringing a bell. You might hear a great bell two or three miles away, but that would be 10 or 15 seconds after it was struck. Thousands of municipalities each worked to their local times.

The Chicago Tribune, for instance, showed 27 local times in Michigan, 38 in Wisconsin, 27 in Illinois and 23 in Indiana. Railroad timetables used about a hundred different standards. A single railroad that traveled east to west would use multiple noons: The Union Pacific, for example, had six different settings in what are today the Central and Mountain zones. The Union Station that served multiple railroads in a big city might have five or six different clocks, one for each railroad in the station, each running on is own time.

As new technology let railroad trains go even faster , the need for a better system was increasingly evident. It might take a farmer several days to bring his produce to a market. A lame ox or horse, a broken wheel, or wet weather that transformed roads to mud could turn those days into weeks. Since travel by water took so long, there was little incentive for a prompt departure.

Indeed, it was prudent to wait until the ship was full and the weather was favorable. In the late fall, missing the boat could mean waiting until spring until the next one. On the other hand, for trains punctuality and regularity increased efficiency and profits. By speeding up travel and decreasing time spent waiting, trains caused people to perceive time as more valuable than they had before. An equally dramatic way in which the railroads influenced the way people perceived time was by getting together in to establish four time zones based on the 75th, 90th, th, and th meridians.

The second map, dated , boldly declares the new time regime. Used with permission of the Newberry Library. With questions about reuse of this image, contact the Newberry Library. The copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works. The map shows Chicago as a crossroads of transportation, with rail lines radiating out in all directions except where Lake Michigan represents its shipping lanes.

Joseph, and Kansas Pacific railroads. The expansion of the railroads in the years following the Civil War only made the confusion over all the local time zones seem worse. Finally, in the spring of , the leaders of the nation's railroads sent representatives to a meeting of what was called the General Railroad Time Convention.

On April 11, , in St. The concept of standard time zones had actually been suggested by several professors going back to the early s. At first, it was suggested that there be two time zones, set to when noon occurred in Washington, D. But that would create potential problems for people living in the West, so the idea eventually evolved into four "time belts" set to straddle the 75th, 90th, th, and th meridians.

And it was formally decided that the new standard of time would take effect a little more than a month later, on Sunday, November 18, As the date for the big change approached, newspapers published numerous articles explaining how the process would work. The shift only amounted to a few minutes for many people. In New York City, for instance, the clocks would be turned back four minutes. Going forward, noon in New York would occur at the same moment as noon in Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities in the East.

In many towns and cities, jewelers used the event to drum up business by offering to set watches to the new time standard. And though the new time standard was not sanctioned by the federal government, the Naval Observatory in Washington offered to send, by telegraph, a new time signal so people could synchronize their watches.

It seems most people had no objection to the new time standard, and it was widely accepted as a sign of progress. Travelers on the railroads, in particular, appreciated it.

As the time change was instituted by the railroads, and voluntarily accepted by many towns and cities, some incidents of confusion appeared in newspapers. A report in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 21, , described an incident where a debtor had been ordered to report to a Boston courtroom at on the previous morning.

The newspaper story concluded:. Incidents like that demonstrated the need for everyone to adopt the new standard time. However, in some places, there was lingering resistance.

An item in the New York Times the following summer, on June 28, , detailed how the city of Louisville, Kentucky, had given up on standard time. Louisville set all its clocks ahead 18 minutes to return to solar time.

The problem in Louisville was that while the banks adapted to the time standard of the railroad, other businesses did not. So there was persistent confusion about when business hours actually ended each day. Of course, throughout the s most businesses saw the value of moving permanently to standard time.

By the s standard time and time zones were accepted as ordinary.