Letters from an American - November 17, 2024

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

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November 17th, 2024. Tonight is a break from the craziness of the news. I often say that 1883 is my favorite year in history because of all that happened in that pivotal year. And one of those things is the way modernity swept across the United States of America in a way that was shocking at the time, but that is now so much a part of our world we rarely even think of it. Until November 18th, 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 18th 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. 15 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 officers 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, 12 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 4 minutes. For Baltimore, the time would move forward 6 minutes and 28 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 Abbey, who developed the U.S. system of weather forecasting. Having joined the United States Weather Bureau as a 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, Abbey 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 Abbey. 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 18th, 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 busyness, 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 eight o'clock this morning at his breakfast table, it will be nine o'clock in St. John, New Brunswick, seven 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. Six o'clock in Denver, Colorado, and five o'clock in San Francisco. That's the whole story in a nutshell. now.