Railroads Standardize Time: Five Zones Unite North America

American and Canadian railroads simultaneously adopted five standardized time zones, replacing a bewildering patchwork of more than 300 local times that had made scheduling trains an exercise in organized confusion. The "Day of Two Noons," as newspapers called November 18, 1883, was the moment the United States began thinking of time as something uniform and universal rather than local and approximate. Before standard time, every city and town set its clocks by the sun. When it was noon in Washington, D.C., it was 12:08 in Philadelphia, 12:12 in New York, and 11:48 in Richmond. This mattered little when the fastest transportation was a horse, but railroads connected these cities in hours, and the timetable chaos was dangerous. A single railroad might operate on dozens of different local times. The Pittsburgh station reportedly used six different clocks. Passengers missed connections. Dispatchers struggled to keep trains on the same stretch of track from colliding. William Frederick Allen, secretary of the General Time Convention, an association of railroad managers, championed the solution. He proposed dividing the continent into four zones, each covering fifteen degrees of longitude and differing by exactly one hour. A fifth zone covered the easternmost provinces of Canada. Allen spent years persuading skeptical railroad executives and politicians that the system would work. The transition happened at noon on November 18. In the Eastern zone, clocks were adjusted to match the time at the 75th meridian. Cities that had been slightly ahead set their clocks back; those behind moved them forward. In some places, the adjustment was only a few minutes. In others, particularly at zone boundaries, clocks jumped by nearly an hour.