In 1883 North American Railroads Gave Noon One Meaning. Here Is What That Took.
On November 18, 1883, US and Canadian railroads reset their clocks to four standard zones. A look at what makes a shared time hold, and what a personal wake-up time is missing.
In this article5 sections
The Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh sent a telegraph signal at noon on November 18, 1883, marking the 90th meridian, and railroad clocks were reset by zone. In some towns that meant setting the hands back, so noon arrived twice. It was a Sunday. From that day the railroads of a country that set its clocks by the sun, town by town, ran their trains on four zones one hour apart.
The change was not ordered by any government. A trade association of railroad managers had decided it a little over a month earlier, and Congress would not catch up for 35 years. That order of events is the useful part: an agreed time existed in practice long before it existed in law, so the law cannot have been what made it hold.
Before 1883, every town and every railroad kept its own noon
Before 1883, noon was whenever the sun stood highest over a given town. The Chicago Public Library’s history of the change puts it plainly: more than 100 different local times resulted from that method. Traveling a few hundred miles east or west moved the correct time by a quarter of an hour or more, which mattered little on a horse and a great deal on a railroad.
Each railroad had solved the problem for itself by keeping a company time, usually that of its headquarters city or a main station. A traveler changing from one line to another might have found two clocks on the same platform disagreeing by many minutes, each correct for its own owner. A station could post a time and a timetable could print one, but nothing guaranteed that the clock in the train’s next stop agreed.
Britain had met the same problem earlier. The Great Western Railway adopted London time in November 1840, the first recorded case of different local times being brought under one standard. The Railway Clearing House decreed on September 22, 1847 that Greenwich Mean Time be used at all stations once the Post Office allowed. The Bristol Exchange’s clock, installed in 1822, was later fitted with a second minute hand to show London time beside local time. Parliament’s Statutes (Definition of Time) Act 1880 came 40 years after the Great Western’s choice.
A railway guide editor wrote the American plan
William F. Allen, the secretary of the General Time Convention and the editor of a railway guide for passengers, proposed dividing the continent into zones an hour apart. The convention, called by the railroads and held at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago, adopted the plan on October 11, 1883. Allen’s job was to collect the agreement of the managers, and his plan asked each railroad to give up its own time in return for one that every other railroad was also giving up.
That is a coordination problem, and its solution is cheap once everyone moves together and expensive for whoever moves alone. On the face of it, no railroad gained by switching first. The convention made switching simultaneous, and the Allegheny signal gave everyone a start time to set against.
A shared clock needs three parts
Looking over the 1883 story, three parts seem to carry the load. The grouping is one reading of the record, not a finding from any study.
| Part | What it did in 1883 | What breaks without it |
|---|---|---|
| Reference | One observatory’s noon on the 90th meridian, with zones defined relative to it | Two clocks, both correct for their owners, disagree |
| Broadcast | The telegraph signal, repeated down the line to station agents | Agreement exists on paper but not on the wall |
| Cost of deviating | Timetables and connections that only work if your clock matches the next station’s | Everyone sets their own clock, and the first inconvenience ends the agreement |
The third row is the one history books tend to skip. On this reading, a railroad that kept a different time from its neighbors was not fined; it missed connections, probably stranded paying passengers and made its printed timetables wrong. Being off carried a price that landed on the person who was off. Nobody had to believe in standard time for it to work. They only had to prefer paid fares to refunds.
A personal alarm has two of the three
A personal wake-up time has the first two parts. The reference is a number you chose, say 6:30, and the broadcast is a phone that rings on schedule. What it usually lacks is the third part. If the alarm is dismissed, the next clock in the line does not shift, no connection is missed, and no one holds the other end of the timetable. Nothing in the arrangement charges the person who is off. DontSnooze, an iPhone app, attaches that charge through friends; see how it works.
This is why a fixed alarm time and a shifting wake-up time can coexist for months. The standard exists on the phone’s screen and nowhere else. A wake time that another person can see may hold better than a private one, since that person is the next station on the line. The ways visible commitments change behavior get fuller treatment elsewhere.
The railroads add one more lesson: the cost has to be attached before the belief arrives. In 1883 nobody was convinced first and affected later. The price for deviating came with the schedule, and the habit followed it. A person trying to move a wake time by an hour will find the order reversed in most advice, which asks for belief in advance and leaves the price at zero.
Where the railroad comparison breaks
The analogy fails in one respect. A railroad standard coordinates many parties who each need the others to match; a wake-up time involves one body and, at most, a handful of witnesses. The railroads also could not renegotiate their time at 6 a.m. while half asleep, which is the situation a person’s alarm lives in. So the cost of deviating for a personal alarm needs to be higher, relative to the effort of complying, than anything the railroads faced.
There is a second limit in the other direction. The standard-time movement did not remove the sun’s claim on the day. It made the clock a convention, and the sun’s schedule still differs from it, more so at the western edge of each zone; a table of how far the sun trails the clock shows how large the gap gets in places like Indianapolis.