Events

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.

British commander Douglas Haig finally called off the Battle of the Somme after 141 days of fighting that had advanced the front line approximately seven miles at a cost of more than one million casualties on both sides. The battle, which had opened with the bloodiest single day in British military history, became the defining catastrophe of World War I and a permanent symbol of the futility of industrial warfare directed by commanders who seemed unable to learn from their own failures. The offensive began on July 1, 1916, after a week-long artillery bombardment that fired 1.75 million shells at the German positions. The barrage was supposed to destroy the deep German dugouts and cut the barbed wire. It did neither. When British infantry went over the top at 7:30 a.m., advancing in rigid lines at walking pace across no man's land, they met intact machine gun positions. The first day produced 57,470 British casualties, including 19,240 dead, most falling in the first hour. Haig continued the offensive for four and a half more months. The tactical approach evolved, with creeping barrages, night attacks, and small-unit infiltration replacing the massed charges of July. The British debut of tanks at Flers-Courcelette on September 15 demonstrated a potential breakthrough weapon, though the early Mark I tanks were too slow, too unreliable, and too few to be decisive. The Germans suffered nearly as heavily as the attackers. Falkenhayn's policy of immediate counterattack to recapture any lost ground meant German soldiers were fed into the same meat grinder. Total German casualties are estimated at 450,000 to 600,000. The battle consumed divisions on both sides at a rate that neither army could indefinitely sustain.