America 250: How our time zones came to be
In 1883, railroad leaders and others gathered in Chicago, the railroad capital of the U.S., to fix a problem: There were no standardized time schedule to run trains.
It had been 14 years since the east and west had been united by rail, with the laying of the famous golden spike in Utah. But even with thousands of miles of track, and passengers and freight traveling on them every day, trains came and went on their own time.
There was no standardized time system to coordinate rail schedules.
“I see time zones as a byproduct or a result of all of the technological work that railroads were doing to bring places closer together,” said David Alff, a University of Buffalo professor and railroad historian.
Alff said that during this period, people often measured time based on the placement of the sun. Midday, or “high noon” was determined when the sun was the highest over a set location. But as clocks replaced sun dials, towns would set their own clocks. This imprecise process continued into the 1800s, when there were at least 144 different time zones in North America.
Bit by bit, the expanding railroads brought clarity to time.
In 1847, British railways adopted a single standard “railway time” time across their networks.
In 1879, Canadian rail engineer Sir Sandford Fleming proposed splitting North America into four time zones, but his idea was complicated by the sprawling size of North America and the political considerations as to where to draw the time zone lines. His ideas, however, would later inspire standard time zones across the planet, as well as the 24-hour clock.
The United Kingdom became the first country to standardize its system of time, implementing Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT in 1880. It’s the average or “mean” time when the sun passes above the Prime Meridian at London’s Royal Observatory, Greenwich, the line where eastern and western hemispheres meet.
Among these developments, the Chicago meeting of railroad leaders came together to discuss the idea of time zones and hammer out a compromise for North American railroads.
On Nov. 18, the goal was realized, as Canadian and American railroads began using four time zones: East, Central, Mountain and Pacific time.
The groundbreaking development improved reliability and safety, allowing for more precise schedules and avoiding potentially deadly scenarios where incorrect timing could lead to trains colliding on the same stretch of track.
Alff said that the railroads forced Americans to change their way of life.
“Railroads provided a means of transportation that was so fast that people needed to be on the same page,” said Alff.
While North American cities, towns and businesses embraced the concept of time zones, the federal government lagged behind on adopting the idea. It wasn’t until 1918 that the United States enacted laws to formally adopt the new time zones.
The times zones across the United States have remained fairly intact, with some changes, such as on April 2, 2006, and March 11, 2007, when six Indiana counties were moved from the Central Time Zone to the Eastern Time Zone.