I love history. As I have written in past blogs, I am deeply amazed at how we all got to this point right now. YOU are reading these words. Perhaps you know me, or perhaps not (yes, I have subscribers now who I don’t know….which is also very cool….thank you). If you think about our universe for a second, astronomical odds have put all of us on the planet right now, in our own spaces and at different times in our lives. As a drummer, I love the concept of time almost as much as history. My fellow drummers will understand this: if I am in a car and music is on AND it’s raining AND the wipers are on…..should the tempo of the wipers NOT align with the tempo of the music (which is almost 100% of the time), I get annoyed. I stay quiet. If I voice this to non-musicians in the car, people will think I have a screw loose. They would not be wrong.
Anyway, I was about to talk about time. This week I am totally stealing and reprinting something about TIME in the United States that I just read. What follows is a blog from a writer that I follow named Heather Cox Richardson. Depending on which side of politics that you fall on, she may or may not be for you. No matter, I found her recent post to be quite interesting, with an underlying nugget hinting at the fact that nothing is ever as wonderful OR as terrible as it seems. What was it like to be alive for this at the time? Enjoy.
“Until November 18, 1883, railroads across the United States operated under 53 different time schedules, differentiated on railroad maps by a complicated system of colors. For travelers, time shifts meant constant confusion and, frequently, missed trains. And then, at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, railroads across the North American continent shifted their schedules to conform to a new standard time. Under the new system, North America would have just five time zones.
Fifteen minutes before the time of the shift, the telegraph company Western Union shut down all telegraph lines for anything but the declaration of the new time. It identified the moment the new time went into effect in telegraph messages to local railroad offices and to the jewelers known in cities for keeping time. In offices that got the message, men had their timepieces in their hands and ready to reset when the chief operator shouted “twelve o’clock!”
In Boston the change meant that the clocks would move forward about 16 minutes; in New York City, clocks were set back about four minutes. For Baltimore the time would move forward six minutes and twenty-eight seconds; in Atlanta it went back 22 minutes.
The system was a dramatic wrench for the rural United States, bringing it into the modern world. Uniform time zones had been proposed by pioneering meteorologist Cleveland Abbe, who developed the U.S. system of weather forecasting. Having joined the United States Weather Bureau as chief meteorologist in 1871, he recognized that predicting the weather required a nationally coordinated team and worked with Western Union to collect information about temperature, wind direction, precipitation, and sunset times from across the country.
Coordinating that information required keeping time across all the stations he had set up. To do so, Abbe divided the United States into four time zones, each one hour apart, and in 1879 he suggested those zones might smooth out the chaos of the railroad systems, each trying to coordinate schedules across a patchwork of local times. Railroad executives, who were concerned that if they didn’t do something, the government would, listened to Abbe, and by 1883 they had concluded to put his new system in place.
Members of the new professional class who traveled by train from city to city were on board because they thought the need to regularize train schedules was imperative. But standard time was controversial. In the United States, people had operated entirely by the rhythms of the sun until the establishment of factories in New England in the 1830s, and most people still lived by those rhythms, their local time adjusting to solar time according to their geographical location.
Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time. The idea of overriding traditional timekeeping because of the needs of the modern world seemed positively sacrilegious. “People…must eat, sleep and work…by railroad time,” wrote a contributor to the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. “People will have to marry by railroad time…. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time…. Banks will open and close by railroad time; notes will be paid or protested by railroad time.”
The mayor of Bangor, Maine, vetoed an ordinance in favor of standard time, saying it was unconstitutional, that it changed the immutable law of God, that the people didn’t want it, and that it was hard on the working men because it changed day into night. Those planning for a switch to standard time tried to ease fears by providing that Americans would operate on both local time and standard time, with both times represented on clocks.
On November 18, no one quite knew what the dramatic wrench into the future might mean.
What did it mean to gain or lose time? Many people expected “a sensation, a stoppage of business, and some sort of a disaster, the nature of which could not be exactly ascertained,” a New York Times reporter recorded. As the great moment approached, people crowded the streets in front of jewelers to see the “great transformation.”
They were disappointed when, after all the buildup, the future arrived quietly.
The New York Times explained: “When the reader of THE TIMES consults his paper at 8 o’clock this morning at his breakfast table it will be 9 o’clock in St. John, New Brunswick, 7 o’clock in Chicago, or rather in St. Louis—for Chicago authorities have refused to adopt the standard time, perhaps because the Chicago meridian was not selected as the one on which all time must be based—6 o’clock in Denver, Col. and 5 o’clock in San Francisco. That is the whole story in a nut-shell.”
Can you imagine? Crazy…but then again, not so much. Time marches on. Want more? Do a search for “Daylight savings time.” STILL a mess….not unlike 1883…
Stay safe, stay awesome, and stay in time.
Patrick moeschen 