All Together Now

NOTE: This episode is a rebroadcast. There may be minor differences between the episode and the transcript you see below.

ED: Today, we take it for granted that within the continental US, there just four different correct times of day, one for each time zone. If it’s noon in Boston, you can be sure it’s also noon in Washington, DC. But in the early 19th century, Boston’s noon wasn’t the same as DC’s noon. People judged time by the Sun, strangely enough. And noon happened whenever the Sun was directly overhead. Because Boston is further east than DC, its noon happen 24 minutes earlier than it did in Washington.

Now, when it took days or even weeks to travel between cities, a 24-minute difference really didn’t matter that much. But then, Americans began traveling by railroad. Suddenly, it mattered a lot.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: Railroads were beginning to run the whole operation, on the time of the city they originated in.

ED: Again, this is historian Mike O’Malley.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: So the train originated in Boston and you were in Worcester, you’d notice a significant difference if you’re to the west, between the local time and the time the railroad was running on.

ED: And if you had say, a 2:00 o’clock train to catch, well, was that 2:00 o’clock Boston time or 2:00 o’clock Worcester time? The system was even more confusing in cities that served several rail lines.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: Supposedly in Buffalo, there were five different clocks, one for each line that used the station and then one for the local Buffalo time.

ED: Looking back several decades later, Harper’s Magazine wrote that quote, “With respect to time, the whole country was a pathless wilderness. Any traveler trying to wend his way across it was doomed to bewildering confusion.” After a decade or two of this, railroads came up with a plan to simplify.

In 1849, all the train lines in New England agreed to set their clocks to the same time, as determined by one especially good Boston clock maker. It was America’s first time zone. Railroads in other parts of the country followed suit.

By 1870, the nation was a patchwork of around 80 time zones, each one following the twists and turns of a particular railroad line. The travelers would still have to reset their watches when they transferred from a New England train to a Southern train say, but there were fewer of those adjustments of time than before. From the railroads’ prospective, this system seemed to work just fine. And they might have stuck with it had it not been for one pesky group that kept pushing for even more standardization, scientists, especially from the brand-new National Weather Service.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: They’re starting to figure out about fronts and drawing isobars on maps that show a weather front. But for our front to be accurate, you need to know if the guy telegraphs in, it’s 2:00 o’clock here in Madison, Wisconsin and it’s rainy, what does he mean, 2:00 o’clock by the Sun? Does he mean Chicago time? Does he mean railroad time? What does 2:00 o’clock mean?

And so they begin to say well, we need a standard. We need a uniform zone system that will tell us exactly what time it is everywhere.

ED: Railroad officials quickly realized that this was one effort they would have to head off at the pass. Because the time zones that would make life easy for a scientist, zones defined by straight lines running north to south, would make it much harder for the railroads.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: Their concern was that if the government introduces a zone system, it won’t fit the breaking points the railroads have already set up. They’re already breaking at points where say the Baltimore Ohio meets the Pennsylvania. They’d shift time there. And they don’t want to have to redo it all.

ED: In October 1883, the heads of the country’s major railroads met in Chicago. They knew that if they didn’t act, the government would. And so they devised a system of time zones that worked for them. There were five of these zones. And the railroads didn’t bother with legislation or with Congress. After all, this is the railroads we’re talking about.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: They just say we’re doing it and you can get on board.

ED: A month later, they implemented what they called Standard Time.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: They called it the “day of two noons.” That’s the nickname. The railroad announced it’s a Sunday. Then at noon on this day, November 18, they’re just going to stop all operations. Wherever the train is, it’s going to stop. And it’s going to wait however long it takes to catch up with what the new Standard Time will be.

And in cities, any city that agrees to go along with it, and most of them do, they stop the clocks or they suddenly move them ahead. And in major cities in America, people get wind of this. And they gather around the clocks wondering sort of anxiously, what’s going to happen. It’s a puzzling thing.

There’s jokes that if you slip on a banana peel at the right moment, you’ll take 15 minutes to fall because time will stop. And then it happens. And the people look at each other and they shrug and nothing much happens.

ED: For most people, syncing their local clocks with railroad time wasn’t that big a deal. It was at most a half hour change, one way or another. But there were a number of holdouts.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: The most famous case that was in the news all over the country was Bangor, Maine. It refused to change its clocks. They were a half an hour or more different from the local Sun. And the mayor refused to change the clocks for a while. And there’s a little town in Ohio where the school board refuses to change the clocks. And the city government has them arrested.

But there are cases into the 20th century, well into the 20th century, where time becomes an issue in courts of law, for example the expiration of a contract. There’s a case in, I think it’s Iowa, I might be remembering wrong, where it’s about last call in a bar. And the bar is open pass the legal hour.

And they go to the bar keeper and they arrest him. And he says no, no, I’m running on Sun time. And he’s legally open he says, because I’m running on solar time, not on railroad time.

And the court agrees. They say that the time of day, since time immemorial, has been governed by the Sun, the moon, and stars. And we aren’t going to set that aside on the mere pretext that the convenience of the railroads demands it.

ED: But it didn’t take too long for most Americans to see that Standard Time made life more convenient for them as well. Before long, even the resistant communities have gotten on board. And a change that the railroads had originally framed in terms of large-scale logistics, came to have real meaning in people’s personal lives.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: What I think is that what Standard Time did is it changed the nature of community. Before Standard Time, the time of day was what the local Sun was doing and was noon in your valley. Or you know, on the other side of the mountain, it was not quite noon yet. But Standard Time, if everybody adopted it, it put people in new forms of relationship to each other.

So after 1883, from, well not quite from Bangor, Maine, from Portland, Maine to Atlanta, everybody’s on Eastern Time. 8:00 o’clock in the morning, means 8:00 o’clock in the morning, regardless of what the Sun is doing. So there’s a form of community is one word for it, or national simultaneity, that wasn’t possible before that.

ED: Right, national simultaneity. And we do tend to think about Standard Time as one of the important nationalizing moments in our history.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: Right.

ED: But by creating time zones in the United States does that reinforce regional ties? After all, you’re kind of bound together with all those people up to the next dividing line.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: Yeah. And that’s probably a significant point. If you think of north, south as being one of the great divides of American life, this obliterates north, south. And it makes north and south the same, all along the eastern seaboard.

ED: Right.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: Whereas before, north and south were very different. It makes east and west a more meaningful difference. And it unites a whole western region, from Texas up to Minnesota, in a single time. So it does rearrange the kind of priorities for community.

ED: In 1918, Congress made Standard Time the law of the land. It was the official legislative stamp on a new way of thinking about time and about America.

Joining us to tell that story was Michael O’Malley. He’s the author of Keeping Watch, a History of American Time.

[MUSIC – PERPETUAL DRIFTERS, “TIME IS A TRAIN”]

PETER: We’re going to take short break, but don’t go away. When we come back, why early Americans found it convenient to visit their neighbors at 1:00 AM.

ED: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.