#citytime

There are 4 time zones in continental America but in the 19th century pretty much every town had its own time zone calculated on the Sun passing overhead. A Sundial principal.

I read an article by Bill Carey with a convoluted mess of times based on city. "New York City was 24 minutes ahead of Washington D.C, which was 11 minutes ahead of Knoxville, TN, which was 20 minutes ahead of Nashville, TN, which was 7 minutes ahead of Clarksville, TN, which was 8 minutes ahead of Memphis, TN, which was 10 minutes ahead of New Orleans, LA." I'm not good at math but I think that's a possible 80 minutes difference between NYC and New Orleans. Mr. Carey concludes that most towns had a highly visible clock that people set their watches by. He quotes the Memphis Appeal newspaper in 1859 as saying "For want of a true and universal standard of time, a thousand hours are lost in this city daily, by reason of people not being able to move and meet upon punctual time." As I was constantly late in my working history & always in trouble, a lack of standard time would have been a terrific excuse.

I found this part extremely interesting as my paternal Grandfather was a Conductor for the Illinois Central Railroad in Memphis. Turns out Railroads are the first to standardize time and it was all about business. The need for a set schedule was obvious and lack of one caused confusion and sometimes wrecks. Each railroad wanted things to run on their own schedule and didn't cooperate on this any more than they did anything else. Each railroad had a particular city in their region that they used as the standard for their schedule. For example, Ohio, Atlantic, & Mississippi lines ran on Washington D.C time with Louisville & Cincinnati lines using Lexington, KY. In cities with more than one railroad, like Memphis, I have no idea how anyone kept track of each railroads timetable. Add to this that railroad time was not city time, there could be a big difference between the two. And...railroads were known to change their time zones from one base city to another. Rail travel seems less romantic and more a pain in the neck.

Finally in November of 1883 the railroads agreed to divided the country into four zones and it became known as Railroad Standard Time. All trains stopped at 10:00 on the morning of November 18th and remained in place until 10:18. This is how they got everyone on the same time and schedule, seems crazy but I guess it worked. Most cities changed their city time to railroad time but a few balked at being told what to do by a bunch of huge companies and refused to adopt the standard, staying mad about it for some time. Mr. Carey says that Detroit, Michigan didn't switch until 1905.

In 1918 the government stepped in, of course they would, and passed the Standard Time Act making an official and precise time in America, Central Standard Time. Later on President Roosevelt decided to mess up everyone's life by coming up with Daylight Savings Time, thinking it would help during the Great Depression. Thanks to Jimmy Carter, during the 1970's financial crisis he decided to bring it back and now we're stuck with the stupid thing. Changing my clocks twice a year is bothersome, and I think we should all take a page out of Arizona's playbook and revolt; for some reason the Navajo Nation stayed with DST. Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, The Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, The Virgin Islands have ditched it and I can only hope that Tennessee gets smart and joins them.