Before the nineteenth century, people kept time by the local reckoning of the position of the Sun; consequently, thousands of local times existed. In medieval Europe, “hours” varied in length, depending upon the seasons: The Roman Catholic Church determined each hour. In the sixteenth century, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was the first secular ruler to decree hours of equal length. As the industrial and scientific revolutions swept Europe, North America, and other areas, some form of time, standardization became necessary as communities and regions increasingly interacted. In 1780 Geneva, Switzerland, was the first locality known to employ a standard time, set by the town-hall clock keeper, throughout the town and its immediate vicinity.
The growth and expansion of railroads, providing the first relatively fast movement of people and goods from city to city, underscored the need for a standard system in Great Britain. As early as 1828, Sir John Herschel, Astronomer Royal, called for a national standard time system based on instruments at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. That practice began in 1852 when the British telegraph system had developed sufficiently for the Greenwich time signals to be sent instantly to any point in the country.
As railroads expanded through North America, they exposed a problem of local time variation similar to that in Great Britain but on a far larger scale since the distances between the East and West Coasts were much more significant than in Great Britain. For long-distance train schedules to work, different parts of the country had to coordinate their clocks. Charles F. Dowd, president of Temple Grove Seminary for Women in Saratoga Springs, New York, was the first to suggest a standard time framework for the United States. Initially, Dowd proposed putting all U.S. railroads on a single standard time, based on the time in Washington, D.C. When he realized that the time in California would be behind such a standard by almost four hours, he produced a revised system, establishing four time zones in the United States. Dowd’s plan, published in 1870, included the country’s first known map of a time zone system. Not everyone was happy with the designation of Washington, D.C., as the administrative center of time in the United States. Northeastern railroad executives urged New York, the nation’s commercial capital, be used instead: Many cities and towns in the region already had standardized to New York time out of practical necessity. Dowd proposed a compromise: to set the entire national time zone system in the United States using the Greenwich prime meridian, already in use in many parts of the world for maritime and scientific purposes. In 1873 the American Association of Railways (AAR) flatly rejected the proposal.
In the end, Dowd proved to be a visionary. In 1878 Sandford Fleming, the chief engineer of the government of Canada, proposed a worldwide system of twenty-four time zones, every fifteen degrees of longitude in width, each bisected by a meridian, beginning with the prime meridian of Greenwich. William F. Allen, general secretary of the AAR and armed with an in-depth knowledge of railroad practices and politics, took up the crusade and persuaded the railroads to agree to a system. At noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, most of the more than six hundred U.S. railroad lines dropped the fifty-three arbitrary times they had been using and adopted Greenwich-indexed meridians that defined the times in each of four times zones: eastern, central, mountain, and Pacific. Most major cities in the United States and Canada followed suit.
Time System for the World
Almost at the same time that American railroads adopted a standard time zone system, the State Department, authorized by the United States Congress, invited governments from around the world to assemble delegates in Washington, D.C., to adopt a global system. The International Meridian Conference convened in the autumn of 1884, attended by representatives of twenty-five countries. Led by Great Britain and the United States, the most favored the adoption of Greenwich as the official prime meridian and Greenwich mean time as universal time.
There were other contenders: The French wanted the prime meridian to be set in Paris, and the Germans wanted it in Berlin; others proposed a mountaintop in the Azores or the tip of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Greenwich won handily. The conference also agreed officially to start the universal day at midnight, rather than at noon or sunrise, as practiced in many parts of the world. Each time zone in the world eventually came to have a local name, although technically, each goes by a letter in the alphabet in order eastward from Greenwich.
Once a global system was in place, there was a new issue: Many jurisdictions wanted to adjust their clocks for part of the year to account for differences in the number of hours of daylight between summer and winter months. In 1918 Congress decreed a daylight-saving time system for the United States but almost immediately abolished it, leaving state governments and communities to their local options. Daylight saving time, or a form of it, returned in the United States and many Allied nations during World War II. In the Uniform Time Act of 1966, Congress finally established a national daylight saving system, with an option for states to abstain.
To the extent that it indicates how human communities want to manipulate time for social, political, or economic reasons, the issue of daylight saving time, rather than the establishment of a system of world time zones, is a better clue to the geographical problems involved in time administration.
The history and the present format of the world time zone system show that the mathematically precise arrangement envisioned by many of the pioneers of time zones is not as important as things on the ground.
In the United States, the railroad time system adopted in 1883 drew the boundary between eastern time and central time, more or less between the thirteen original states and the trans-Appalachian West: The entire Midwest, including Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, fell in the central time zone. As the center of the population migrated westward, train speeds increased, highways developed, and New York emerged as the center of mass media in the United States; the boundary between the eastern and central time zones marched steadily westward. In 1918 it ran down the middle of Ohio; by the 1960s, it was on the outskirts of Chicago. One of the principal reasons for the popularity of Greenwich as the site of the prime meridian (zero degrees longitude) is that it places the international date line (180 degrees longitude)—where, in effect, the time has to move forward to the next day rather than the next hour—far out in the Pacific Ocean where few people are affected by what otherwise would be an awkward arrangement. However, even this line is somewhat irregular to avoid placing a small section of eastern Russia and some of The Aleutian Islands of the United States on different days.
By 1950 most nations had adopted the universal time zone system, although a few followed later: Saudi Arabia in 1962 and Liberia in 1972. Despite adhering to the system in principle, many nations take considerable liberties with the zones, especially if their territory spans several time zones. Western Europe remains on a single standard despite covering an area equivalent to two zones. The People’s Republic of China, which stretches across five different time zones, arbitrarily sets the entire country officially on Beijing time, eight hours behind Greenwich. Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Myanmar, each straddle time zone boundaries, operate on half-hour compromise systems as their time standards (as does Newfoundland). As late as 1978, Guyana’s standard time was three hours, forty-five minutes before Greenwich.
It can be argued that the adoption of a worldwide system of time zones in the late nineteenth century was one of the earliest manifestations of the emergence of a global economy and society and has been a crucial factor in the unfolding of this process throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
