The Backstory: Hey, What Time Is It?

Do you realize it was only a little over 140 years ago that the world began to adopt standardized time zones? You could take a 10am train to another town and arrive at 9:50am . . because most towns had their own clocks. For thousands of years we basically looked at the sun to tell time but transportation and communications changed everything. This is how they did it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, is there anything more frustrating than trying to
keep track of time? I mean we're always either running late,
or we live or work with somebody who's always late,
or sometimes we're just waiting. That can be the worst. Well,
there was a time when measuring time was really confusing.
Did you know that? As recently as one hundred and

(00:21):
forty years ago a lot of places set their own time.
I'm Patty Steele. Imagine getting on a train at ten
am in your town and arriving several towns away at
nine to forty five. That happened, and it's next on
the backstory. We're back with the backstory. Time, either not

(00:41):
enough or too much of it, has always been irritating
for humans. Why Because we're social beings. What we do
and when we do it realies on other people's expectations
and schedules. Whether you're hopping on a zoom call, picking
kids up, meeting for dinner, or milking cows, for all
involved is essential. The ancient world knew this and developed

(01:04):
their own ways of keeping time very early on. Their
day was based on sun up, sun high in the sky,
and sundown. The average Roman worked a six hour day
from sun up until noon, then spent the rest of
the day socializing and indulging in the communal baths. Not
a bad day. It was pretty much the same for
the Greeks. Those folks, wealthy and working class alike, worked

(01:28):
shorter days and really valued leisure time, but they still
needed to have a way to fulfill time expectations. Shadow
clocks aka sundials worked for the Greeks and Romans, but
what happened on a cloudy day or at night, so
they also used water clocks, as did folks in ancient China.
Water clocks relied on a precise hole with a tiny

(01:51):
tube in the bottom of a vessel that allowed water
to drip out at a steady rate. Lines inside the
vessel would tell you how much time it past. But
as time went on, especially starting in the eighteen hundreds,
everybody needed a more precise way of telling time that
didn't rely on church bells. You weren't just getting up
to milk the cows. You might be expected at a

(02:13):
factory at a specific time to start your shift, and
as transportation sped up, getting to work or an event
on time might mean taking a train. So imagine boarding
a train in the eighteen hundreds. You arrive at the
station at exactly noon. The train schedule says departure is
at twelve oh five. Yet somehow, when you reach the

(02:34):
next town just a few miles away, their clock says
it's now twelve oh four. Head to another town, it
might be twelve twenty. Here's the problem. No one agrees
on what time it is. This wasn't a mistake, it
was reality, and for much of human history there was
no such thing as a standard time. Every city, every village,

(02:55):
and sometimes every town square kept its own version of time.
The result was confusion, accidents, and eventually a battle that
would quietly reshape civilization. You see, for thousands of years,
time was local. People simply looked at the sun. When
the sun was highest in the sky, it was noon.
That's simple. Well, here's where it gets sticky. According to

(03:18):
the Earth's movement, noon in one town is not noon
exactly in the next. Because the Earth is round, the
sun reaches its highest point at slightly different moments depending
on where you are. A town fifty miles east actually
experiences noon. Air quotes there a few minutes before a
town to the west. Before the Industrial Revolution, nobody cared.

(03:41):
Most people almost never traveled far from home. Communication moved
at the speed of a horse. A few minutes here
or there really didn't make any difference. Then everything changed.
The railroad arrived. Suddenly trains were crossing entire countries at
speeds humanity had never dreamed of much less variance. It
became a really dangerous problem. By the eighteen fifties, hundreds

(04:05):
of railroads crisscrossed North America and Europe. Pretty much every
railroad company operated on its own time system. In the
United States alone, there were hundreds of local times in use. Again,
you could leave one station at ten, then arrive at
another station where the clock said it's nine to fifty two,
and the board a train leaving at nine point fifty eight.

(04:27):
Schedules became nightmares. In order to help people cope, newspapers
printed pages of conversion charts. Conductors had to carry multiple watches.
As you can imagine, passengers mistrains all the time. But
worst of all, trains sometimes crashed into each other because
they were following different clocks. Railroads depended on precise scheduling.

(04:50):
Two trains traveling on the same track in opposite directions
had to know exactly when and where they would pass,
and a difference of just a couple of minutes could
be met disaster. When infamous accident occurred in Rhode Island
in eighteen fifty three, two trains operating under different clocks
crashed head on, killing fourteen people. Railroad executives decided local

(05:14):
time had turned into a threat and something had to change.
But changing time how was tougher than it sounds. A
Canadian engineer named Sir Sandford Fleming had a radical idea.
Instead of every town getting its own clock, the world
should be divided into time zones. Wow, that's nuts. Each

(05:34):
zone would share the same official time. Actually sounds obvious, right,
Not so much. In fact, at the time it sounded outrageous,
believe it or not. A lot of communities viewed local
time as part of their identity. Why should a distant
government or railroad company tell them what time it was?
Some religious leaders objected, local politicians objected, townspeople objected. The

(05:57):
battle lines were drawn. If the world was going to
share a system of time, where would the clock start?
What location should represent zero? They became a huge international argument.
France wanted the starting point to be Paris, Britain wanted
it at the Royal Observatory in the London borough of Greenwich. Clearly,
this wasn't really about geography, it was about power. It

(06:20):
would be very prestigious to be the nation controlling the
world's reference point. Of course, there had to be a
giant conference. There's always a conference. So in eighteen eighty four,
delegates from around the globe gathered at the International Meridian
Conference in Washington, d C. At the end of the day,
literally Greenwich won the prime meridian. The modern system of

(06:43):
time would run through England. Keep in mind this was
only one hundred and forty two years ago, and after
all that, they still had to convince ordinary folks to
buy in. A lot of towns refused to change newspapers
mocked it, calling in an attack on local traditions. But
the railroads were already ahead of the game. On November eighteenth,

(07:04):
eighteen eighty three, before the big conference, a day known
as the Day of two Noons, American and Canadian railroads
switched to a standardized system. Thousands of clocks were adjusted.
Some towns gained minutes, others lost them. People literally watched
time jump forward or backward, as you can imagine it
felt kind of bizarre, but for railroad operators it felt

(07:27):
like salvation. Schedules suddenly worked, connections improved, confusion decreased dramatically.
The railroads had effectively standardized time before governments officially adopted
it the next year. Over the following decades, countries around
the world joined the system. Time zones spread across continents,

(07:48):
International commerce became easier, global communications became possible. Eventually, aviation, telecommunications, broadcasting,
and the Internet would all depend on the frame work
established during those battles. The modern world runs on synchronized time.
Without it, global stock markets couldn't operate efficiently, air traffic

(08:10):
control would be a mess, international business would be chaotic. Hey,
even our smartphones depend on the invisible system created more
than a century ago. So today most of us never
think about time zones. We glance at a phone and
assume everybody agrees on the hour. But it all began
with a remarkable story in a time of amazing change.

(08:32):
It's a story of railroad accidents, international politics, stubborn towns
devoted to tradition, and one of the strangest debates in
human history. Because before humanity could connect the world with trains, telegraphs, airplanes,
and computers. It first had to answer a surprisingly difficult question,
a question whose answer changed civilization forever, the question, Hey,

(08:57):
what time is it? Hope you're enjoying The Backstory with
Patty Steele. Please leave a review and follow or subscribe
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free to dm me if you have a story you'd
like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and
on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory

(09:22):
is a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Duran Group,
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Mike Pieseglia. Our
writer is Jake Kushner. New episodes are out every Tuesday
and Friday, and feel free to reach out to me
with comments and story suggestions on Instagram at reel Patty
Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening

(09:44):
to the Backstory with Patty Steele. The pieces of history
you didn't know you needed to know