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How Standard Time
Was Started
Before Sunday, November 18, 1883, every community in the United States had its own local time, and was proud of it. Worse, ' each of the 600 railroads had its own time—and ran on it. So a traveler from Maine, arriving in Buffalo, might find his watch reading 12:15, the Buffalo cityi clock reading 11:40, the New York Central assuring him it was 12 noon, and the Lake Shore Rail* road asserting it was 11:25. A watch was a delusion, a time table confusion 600 times confounded* -- Offended by the nation’s “pathless wilderness of time,"” orderly Charles Ferdinand Dowd, principal of the Temple Grove Ladies’ Seminary at Saratoga Springs, proposed our time belts across the nation, using Greenwich time as a base. Calculating the correct local time, on longitude for each of the 8000 railroad stations, he published his findings in a pamphlet that he mailed to railroad executives. Then year after year Dowd went and talked at their conventions. From the first, the railroad groups acknowledged the plan’s value, but they were engaged ih a bitter rate and “fast train” wan, and a road’s own time was a great help in clipping a few minutes off a competitor’* time > between cities. Finally, faced with the demand of an exasperated public, the American - fiai&ray AtVr: plan in 1883, and the whole country followed.
On the last day under the old. system, “when the sun reached the meridian of the eastern border of Maine,” as Harper’s Weekly told the story, “the clocks began their jangle for the hour of noon and kept it up in a drift across the country for four hours, like incoherent cowbells in a wlMi wood. But on Monday, the 19th, no clock for this hour till the sun reached the 75th meridian. Then all the clocks on the continent struck together, those in the (Eastern striking 12, those in the Central striking 11, those in the1 Mountain striking 10, and those in the Pacific striking 9. Time tables everywhere became intelligible.-—Roger William Biis to The Rotarian.
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