As we noted in class on Tuesday, railroad companies’ need for predictable timetables (schedules) that spanned the continent led to the the start of standard time zones in the United States in 1883. A question raised in class was whether such a change in timekeeping happened worldwide at that time. The creation of international time zones resulted from an international conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1884, but not all places recognized and adopted it right away.
It turns out that Great Britain adopted a nationwide standard time before any other country, but it was a forty-year process (1840-1880) to implement the so-called Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT. As in the U.S., railroads embraced standard time soonest and most enthusiastically. In the U.S., despite railroads’ quick adoption of standard time zones in the 1880s, a number of cities and towns continued to use “local time,” determined by the relative position of the sun and thus different for every set of latitude/longitude coordinates. Only in 1918, through an act of Congress, did standard time zones become enshrined in law. For more information, consult http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/d.html.
