On November 18, 1883, the railroad companies of the United States changed the way we tell time. While we take the keeping of time for granted with our automatically updated internet time and perpetually running and accurate electric clocks, back in the 19th century, and for all of human history before that, the tracking of time was much more difficult and local. The only reliable means for knowing the time was to measure the position of the sun. By the 1800’s, towns and municipalities would make life easier on their citizens by erecting a clocktower that would serve as the agreed-upon, sun-based time for that area. Citizens would set their personal watches and clocks, if they had them, by that main clock. This meant, however, that each town and city would have a slightly different measure of time, as even 10 miles distance would provide a variance in the times of sunset, sunrise, and high noon, which was the typical milestone on which local times were based.
In the slow-traveling days of the 19th century and earlier, these local time differences didn’t matter much. On horseback, the fastest means of travel for millennia, one might reach two or three towns in a single day if he was ambitious, making the variance in time unimportant. But the 19th century saw the beginnings of the innovations, in the form of railroads and the telegraph, that would start to make our world smaller. A trip from New York to Pittsburgh would take roughly two weeks in 1800, but just 60 years later could be done, via rail, in a single day. Given the local time zones, a train traveling from New York to Pittsburgh via Philadelphia would need to list each stop time in the time zones of each city, leading to perhaps some of the most confusing timetables one could imagine.
Because it was their business that was most sorely affected by the hundreds and thousands of different times kept across the country, the railroad companies decided to implement a new system. They worked out deals with all of the major cities in the country to classify four new time zones. They essentially parceled the country into four vertical slices, each of which would have an agreed upon time within it. The change went into effect on November 18, 1883, when clocks around the nation were turned off for seconds, or even minutes, to align their time with the new standard. In one scene, the dual clocks at the Philadelphia train station, one proclaiming New York time and the other Philadelphia time, were pulled down and replaced with a single timepiece.
While this switch was largely honored across the country, it wasn’t by any means mandated as the law of the land. Detroit, apparently unsure of just what time they wanted it to be, switched back and forth between their own “city time” and the central time zone a number of times before settling on the new standard. By 1918, Congress decided to codify the time zones, and passed the Standard Time Act, which largely followed the time zone borders laid out by the railroad companies. This new law also introduced a controversial addition to standardized timekeeping in the form of Daylight Savings Time, but that’s a story for another time.