AtDTDA (2): 30 Railroad Watch

[Dave Monroe]

On 2/2/07, mhayes at asiaaccess.net.th <mhayes at asiaaccess.net.th> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure if this was the case in USA, but in Europe, particualr
> France and England, before they started using Greenwich time, the
> railway time was different to the local time, which could also be
> different to the time in the capital, so people often had to carry two
> watches if they wanted to be sure to get their train (I don't know if
> this was called your railway watch, though).

Interestingly, the standard timekeeping system related to this
arrangement of time zones was made official in the United States by an
Act of Congress in March 1918, some 34 years following the agreement
reached at the international conference. In an earlier decision
prompted by their own interests and by pressures for a standard
timekeeping system from the scientific community — meteorologists,
geophysicists and astronomers — the U.S. railroad industry anticipated
the international accord when they implemented a "Standard Railway
Time System" on November 18, 1883. This Standard Railway Time, adopted
by most cities, was the subject of much local controversy for nearly a
decade following its inception.

http://www.physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/world.html

In the United States and Canada, standard time zones were introduced
on November 18 1883, by American and Canadian railroads. Newspapers
referred to that day as "the Day of Two Noons." There was no
legislative enactment or ruling: the railroads simply adopted a five
zone system encompassing North America from Nova Scotia to California,
and assumed the public would follow. The American Railway Association,
an organization of railroad managers, had noticed growing scientific
interest in standardizing time. The ARA devised their own system,
which had irregular zone boundaries which followed then-existing
boundaries of different lines, partly in order to head off government
action which might have been inconvenient to their operations. Most
people simply accepted the new time, but a number of cities and
counties refused to accept "railroad time", which, after all, had not
been made law. In, for example, the expiration of a contract--what
does "midnight" mean? In one Iowa Supreme Court case, the owner of a
saloon argued that he operated by local (sun) time, not "railroad
time," and so he had not violated laws about closing time. Standard
time remained a local matter until 1918, when it was made law as part
of the introduction of daylight saving.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time

On November 18, 1883, four standard time zones for the continental
U.S.A. were introduced at the instigation of the railroads. At noon on
this day the U.S. Naval Observatory changed its telegraphic signals to
correspond to the change. Until the invention of the railway, it took
such a long time to get from one place to another that local "sun
time" could be used. When traveling to the east or to the west, a
person would have to change his or her watch by one minute every
twelve miles.

When people began traveling by train, sometimes hundreds of miles in a
day, the calculation of time became a serious problem. Operators of
the new railroad lines realized that a new time plan was needed in
order to offer a uniform train schedule for departures and arrivals.

Since every city was using a different time standard, there were over
300 local sun times to choose from. The railroad managers tried to
address the problem by establishing 100 railroad time zones, but this
was only a partial solution to the problem.

The fact remained that the different railroad lines were using time
schedules that varied from each other and from the cities they passed
through, causing considerable befuddlement. Where railroad lines using
different time zones intersected with each other, or with cities using
different time standards, travelers were especially confused.

During the mid-nineteenth century, people throughout the world had
experimented with methods of standardizing their clocks. In 1830 the
U.S. Naval Observatory was created to cooperate with Great Britain's
Greenwich Observatory to determine time based on astronomical
observations. Accurate sea navigation based on the calculation of
latitude and longitude, depended on accurate timekeeping.

Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph made it possible to
coordinate time signals over long distances. In the 1840s, the Royal
Greenwich Observatory established an official standard time for all of
England, Scotland, and Wales. The U.S. Naval Observatory was
responsible for keeping official time in the United States.

U.S. railway managers were the first to adopt a plan to simplify
calculation of time for the convenience of travelers within the
continental United States. They agreed that four time zones would be
adopted: Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific Time. Local times
would no longer be used by the railroads. The American Railway
Association obtained the cooperation of city governments served by the
railroads. The U.S. Naval Observatory agreed to make the change.

At twelve o'clock noon on November 18, 1883, as Greenwich Mean Time
(GMT) was transmitted, the U.S. Naval Observatory began signaling the
new time standard. Authorities in major cities and managers of the
railroad reset their clocks. All over the United States and Canada,
people changed their clocks and watches in synchronization with their
zone's standard time. In one moment the many different standards of
time that had caused conflict and confusion, were resolved into four
simple standards.

A year later, on November 1, 1884, the International Meridian
Conference in Washington, D.C. agreed to establish international zones
according to the same system. GMT was considered the "time zero," and
the twenty-four standard meridians marked the centers of the zones....

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/nov18.html

> Having two times does fit with much of what is going on in this book

Indeed it does.  Thanks!