There were some train table examples that showed over 100 local times which varied by more than 3 hours. Railroad executives asserted that timekeeping required greater uniformity to ensure efficiency, and-in a truly smart move-the companies created four different continental time zones that are quite similar to the ones still in use today. The myriad of different local times resulted in a scheduling nightmare where dozens of different arrival and departure times were listed for each train. The railroads played a crucial part in this evolution. and Canadian railways, and, subsequently, four continental time zones emerged to put an end to this craziness. In 1870, Charles Dowd offered a similar suggestion that was also rejected however, Dowd’s second proposal in 1872 was ultimately adopted on 18 November 1883 by U.S. In 1809, Lambert unsuccessfully recommended the concept of time meridians-or different time zones-to Congress. However, the lack of consistency caused problems as more modern technology such as the advent of the railroad made each city interconnected. The recurring problem was that time was a local construct with most towns and cities using some type of local solar time, typically based on “high noon”-the time when the sun was the highest in the sky. to preach the necessity for time standardization. William Lambert-an amateur astronomer-was the first person in the U.S. Now, let’s hop across the pond and examine the U.S.’s convoluted Standard Time timeline. GMT remains the same all year round, and is the time against which the rest of the world’s time is measured.Įventually, by 1855, the majority of British public clocks were set to GMT, and on 2 August 1880, the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act took effect-essentially changing the legal system to GMT.
London time-also became known as Greenwich mean time (GMT)-is the time at the Royal Observatory’s Shepherd Gate Clock in-you guessed it-Greenwich, England. That name stuck and we still use that nomenclature today. It was consequently called “Standard Time” because it standardized the time across Britain. Soon, other railways followed, and by 1847, most railways used this time. Thus, in November 1840-the Great Western Railway was the first to follow “London” time. With different cities and regions having their own local time, as technological progress advanced our ability to communicate and travel between localities, you can imagine the confusion that could have ensued.īritain became was the first country to establish one Standard Time throughout the country in response to the railways’ overt criticisms of local mean time. Time began to be based on a consistent division of the day regardless of day or night like we have today, where a day is divided by hours, minutes and seconds.ĭespite this wonderful new invention, cities would set their own time by measuring the sun’s position, and, therefore, everyone would be on slightly different time. Thus, sundials and water clocks were the clocks of yore until mechanical clocks appeared well into the Middle Ages. Their goal was to have a set number of “hours” in a day between sunrise and sunset, so they had to change the length of each vessel depending on how much time there was between the sun rising and setting. Instead of using the same vessels each month, the Romans used different sizes for different months, meaning their “hours” would be longer or shorter based on the month. which used the flow of water in or out of a vessel to measure the passage of time. The ancient Romans and Greeks advanced the concept of tracking time by inventing water clocks. The time on a sundial is logically called solar time, or true local time, whereas the time on a clock is called mean solar time. Because they had no moving parts, sundials were easy to build and proliferated quickly. Sundials were the first invention to keep track of time. Since the dawn of man, time has been measured based on the sun’s position in the sky.