How railroads inspired the creation of time zones
On this day [Nov.17] in 1883, railroad companies in the United States and Canada transformed time in both countries, leading to the ground-breaking concept of time zones around the world...
For millennia prior to this date, many people around the world measured time based on the placement of the Sun, with midday (or "high noon") determined by when the Sun was highest in the sky over that particular village or town. Mechanical clocks eventually started replacing sundials in the Middle Ages. Towns would set their clocks by gauging the position of the Sun, leading every city to operate on a slightly different time. This method lasted well into the 1800s, when there were at least 144 different time zones in North America.
"The existence of different local time zones created major problems for the railroad," [Jon Goldman, chief curator at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore] explained. "At best, people might miss their train; at worst, trains were more likely to collide when using a single track."
During this time, the UK – which birthed the modern railway in 1825 – had already experienced a very similar issue. As railroads began to better connect cities and towns to one another, it became apparent that stations couldn't keep listing dozens of arrival and departure times for each train based on local time zones. By 1847, all British railway companies had adopted a single standard "Railway Time" time across their networks. The new timekeeping method (now known as Greenwich Mean Time) was adopted nationwide in 1880, making the UK the first country to standardise time...
...But unlike the UK which only had to standardise time across a country, the US and Canada needed to figure out a way to standardise time across an entire continent.
In 1879, a Canadian rail engineer named Sir Sanford Fleming came up with a revolutionary idea after missing a train: the creation of time zones. On 18 November 1883, the US and Canadian railroad industries adopted Fleming's idea, but because of the sheer size of the North American continent, it was decided that four major time zones would be created: Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific time – each of which remain relatively unchanged to this day...
For millennia prior to this date, many people around the world measured time based on the placement of the Sun, with midday (or "high noon") determined by when the Sun was highest in the sky over that particular village or town. Mechanical clocks eventually started replacing sundials in the Middle Ages. Towns would set their clocks by gauging the position of the Sun, leading every city to operate on a slightly different time. This method lasted well into the 1800s, when there were at least 144 different time zones in North America.
"The existence of different local time zones created major problems for the railroad," [Jon Goldman, chief curator at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore] explained. "At best, people might miss their train; at worst, trains were more likely to collide when using a single track."
During this time, the UK – which birthed the modern railway in 1825 – had already experienced a very similar issue. As railroads began to better connect cities and towns to one another, it became apparent that stations couldn't keep listing dozens of arrival and departure times for each train based on local time zones. By 1847, all British railway companies had adopted a single standard "Railway Time" time across their networks. The new timekeeping method (now known as Greenwich Mean Time) was adopted nationwide in 1880, making the UK the first country to standardise time...
...But unlike the UK which only had to standardise time across a country, the US and Canada needed to figure out a way to standardise time across an entire continent.
In 1879, a Canadian rail engineer named Sir Sanford Fleming came up with a revolutionary idea after missing a train: the creation of time zones. On 18 November 1883, the US and Canadian railroad industries adopted Fleming's idea, but because of the sheer size of the North American continent, it was decided that four major time zones would be created: Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific time – each of which remain relatively unchanged to this day...
