How American Time Was Standardized

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If you look at your watch today, you will know not only what time it is in your city, your state, and your time zone but what time it is half way round the world.  (If you can’t work that last one out straight away, you can simply bing time zone converter and let the Internet work it out for you.  If you looked at your time piece in 1882, you would only know what time it was in your town.  For chances were excellent that the town nearby had its own time.  So, for example, when it was noon in Chicago, it was 12’31 in Pittsburgh, 12:24 in Cleveland, 12:13 in Cincinnati and 12:07 in Indianapolis.

This was no accident.  Americans did not want their time standardized.  The arguments, as Stephen Fried writes, probably sounded a lot like the arguments you hear against government interference and regulation today.  Americans have a very long history of not wanting big government telling them what to do.  Which is why it fell to big business to boss Americans around.

For having over 50 major time zones was simply not good for business.  Especially when that business was railroads.  Different time zones meant that passengers had no real idea when their train might arrive.  It also (and far more worrying at a time when much of the railroad’s business relied on freight not passengers) meant that train collisions were frequent. 

And so, on October 11, 1883 at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago, representatives of all the major railroads ratified a time-keeping system for the United States.  It was a plan the US government had spent the past 13 years trying to get ratified—with no success.  From that day (called The Day of Two Noons) the United States would be divided into the four time zones we know and the times in each would be standardized.  Not by big government but by big business.