How Standard Is Time?

In the early 1800's, without clocks in most New England households, time was kept according to the position of the sun. The exact moment when the sun was directly overhead, and cast no shadow was noon. Many villages and towns had a tower clock in a church or town hall that kept all informed of the village's official time.

The earth's rotation, however, creates a new "noon" every 12 1/2 miles along the same east-west latitude. So as long as people stayed in their own villages, there was no problem. With the transportation of the day, no one could go far enough, fast enough for it to make much difference. Industrialization would change all that.

The earth's tilt on its axis creates another problem for telling time by the sun. The sun in the sky at noon varies in its position, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. And each day's noon falls a few seconds or minutes earlier or later than noon of the previous day. This concept was vividly demonstrated in 1826 when Eli Terry, the famous clock maker in New Haven, CT., was commissioned to build and install a clock in the town hall there. Before too long after its installation, the townspeople began to notice an increase in difference in time on the new clock as compared to their other source of public time, the Yale College clock. Day by day the difference increased until it became 15 minutes; then the contrasts slowly lessened, until the two clocks were again in sync, and the cycle repeated.

Ordinary clocks, as Terry's was, cannot follow the sun's irregular movement. Rather, they just tell mean time. Any ordinary clock set to solar noon one day soon begins to drift from the sun and can read up to 15 minutes faster or slower than a sundial. The Yale College clock had been designed with an apparatus that produced a daily variation from mean time that exactly equaled the variation of the sun, and registered apparent time. The two clocks revealed two very different ways of thinking about time. Conflicts like this probably occurred all across the colonies, as clocks became more common. So in the middle of the 19th century, the view of time as it relates to the world of commerce, promptness and reliability began to change.

Time was confusing enough with the majority of Americans clustered along the eastern seaboard, their village time separated by fractions of hours, but when America's population began moving westward, it became much more complicated. The newly acquired abilities to communicate by telephone, to light the night, to travel via luxurious transatlantic steamers, and by rail lines, moved the nation ever so quickly forward. It seemed that the traditional relation of time with nature was impeding progress. Which time was official when one traveled a hundred miles? When a passenger entered a large train station, he faced a bevy of clocks behind the ticket counter, each one reflecting standard time according to each railroad's headquarters. If he wanted to know his time of arrival, he would have to know the time standard of the railroad on which he was riding. To make one or more connections with other trains was nearly impossible. The passengers' frustrations were also felt within the railroad companies. Desperately fearing government intervention, the railroads felt they must come up with a solution before one was imposed on them.

Sanford Fleming, the engineer-in-chief of Canada's two major road-building projects, is generally known as the man responsible for Standard Time. His thoughts were provoked when he missed a train!

Fleming had arrived at the train station a full 25 minutes before his train's departure time. Noticing the lack of people in the station as the train's arrival time approached, he checked his railroad traveler's guide again. As 5:35 p.m. came and went with no train, he eventually discovered that the train was to arrive at 5:35 a.m.! He, the chief engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway, would therefore be forced to spend the night in the station, then miss his connection to his ferry to England. He had lot of time to spend thinking about a solution.

His wasted 16 hours made Fleming realize that the problem was much greater than a simple misprint in a travel guide. It was an example of the industrial world's inefficiency ... 16 hours multiplied by the number of people affected in the same manner by the world's outdated system of keeping time.

An idea of time zones and the relationship to longitude began taking shape. Four months later, Fleming presented his first paper on " terrestrial, not local" time. Fleming felt that the entire world should be able to tell what time it was everywhere, instantaneously and that, although time zones could be used locally, the world should be on a universal time. His original proposal was much too complicated, and did not endorse a prime meridian where times zones for the world were to begin, but it was the start of a movement.

The eventual change to a standard time across the North American continent came via the railroads themselves, not by the government intervention they so feared. In 1883 at the semi-annual meeting of the General Time Convention in St. Louis, the American Railroad Association's fifty managers of grand trunk railroads voted to accept the proposal of their secretary, William Allen. The number of time standards would be reduced from nearly fifty to a mere four - Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific (the same names, though not the same zones as today).

On Sunday, November 18, 1883, as Railroad Standard Time took effect, the day became known as "The Sunday of Two Noons." As towns on the eastern edges of each of the four new time zones turned their clocks back half an hour to synchronize with towns along the western edges of the same zone, for each there were two noons. Within a few days most schools, courts and local governments had adopted railroad time as their official time. A few towns such as Bangor, Maine, and Savannah, Georgia, refused to change for religious and other reasons, and some on the borders of the time zones couldn't decide which zone to join.

In 1884 the Prime Meridian Conference, called by President Chester Arthur, but actually spurred by Sanford Fleming, gathered in Washington D.C. This group of astronomers and diplomats from the world's twenty-six independent countries, set Standard Time for the world. Yet it wasn't until 1918 that Congress ratified Standard Time for the nation.

Of all the changes that came about during the Industrial Age, Standard Time with all its ramifications ... the Greenwich Prime Meridian, the counting of longitudes west and east from Greenwich, the 24-hour clock, the international date line, and the 24 time zones has had a deep, and long-lasting effect on us all.