US Railway Time Zone

Time zones, a novel concept in the 1800s, were created by railroad officials who convened meetings in 1883 to deal with a major headache. It was becoming impossible to know what time it was.

The underlying cause of confusion was simply that the United States had no time standard. Each town or city would keep its own solar time, setting clocks so noon was when the sun was directly overhead.

That made perfect sense for anyone who never left town, but it became complicated for travelers. Noon in Boston would be a few minutes before noon in New York City. Philadelphians experienced noon a few minutes after New Yorkers did. And on and on, across the nation.

For railroads, which needed reliable timetables, this created a huge problem. "Fifty-six standards of time are now employed by the various railroads of the country in preparing their schedules of running times," reported the front page of the New York Times on April 19, 1883.

Something had to be done, and by the end of 1883 the United States, for the most part, was operating on four time zones. Within a few years, the entire world followed that example.

So it's fair to say the American railroads changed the way the entire planet told time.

The Decision to Standardize Time

The expansion of the railroads in the years following the Civil War only made the confusion over all the local time zones seem worse. Finally, in the spring of 1883, the leaders of the nation's railroads sent representatives to a meeting of what was called the General Railroad Time Convention.

On April 11, 1883, in St. Louis, Missouri, railroad officials agreed to create five time zones in North America: Provincial, Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific.

The concept of standard time zones had actually been suggested by several professors going back to the early 1870s. At first, it was suggested that there be two time zones, set to when noon occurred in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans. But that would create potential problems for people living in the West, so the idea eventually evolved into four "time belts" set to straddle the 75th, 90th, 105th, and 115th meridians.

On October 11, 1883, the General Railroad Time Convention met again in Chicago. And it was formally decided that the new standard of time would take effect a little more than a month later, on Sunday, November 18, 1883. As the date for the big change approached, newspapers published numerous articles explaining how the process would work.

The shift only amounted to a few minutes for many people. In New York City, for instance, the clocks would be turned back four minutes. Going forward, noon in New York would occur at the same moment as noon in Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities in the East. In many towns and cities, jewelers used the event to drum up business by offering to set watches to the new time standard. And though the new time standard was not sanctioned by the federal government, the Naval Observatory in Washington offered to send, by telegraph, a new time signal so people could synchronize their watches.

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