It's About Time: From Calendars and Clocks to Moon Cycles and Light Years - a History by Liz Evers

Author:Liz Evers [Evers, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782430674
Amazon: 1782430679
Publisher: Michael O'Mara
Published: 2014-04-01T23:00:00+00:00

An early steam locomotive

Train time

With the surge in railway building across Europe and America, it became pretty obvious that a standard time was needed for services to run efficiently.

Greenwich Mean Time was first officially used by the railway system in Britain in 11 December 1847 – with every train having its own portable chronometer set to GMT. And to facilitate the precision of ‘railway time’, as it became known, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich began to transmit time signals by telegraph in August 1852.

However, it took another thirty years-plus for standard time to replace local time on the US railway system. The different railway companies in America set their own time standards. The leading standards were New York time, Pennsylvania time, Chicago time, Jefferson City (Missouri) time and San Francisco time – and with so many competing ‘local’ times in use, things got rather confusing.

In October 1883, the heads of all the US and Canadian railway companies met in Chicago and agreed to adopt a four-time-zone standard (five time zones are now in use). On 18 November 1883, all the railways readjusted their clocks as per their relevant time zones, though Standard Time was not enacted into law in the US until 1918.

The railways literally carried standard time around these countries and in just a few years all time was set to match it – except the time kept by the British Post Office that is, which continued to be ‘London time’ rather than GMT until 1872. GMT became the legal time in Britain in 1880.

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