Chapter 20 - The Sun is not longer boss

Before the railroad, people didn't worry about being on time. The sun determined the time, but it varied depending on location. With the arrival of railroads, there was confusion about time because each town had its own clock set to its own time. The idea of standard time was proposed to set clocks the same in each city. The railroads agreed, and on November 18, 1893, standard time was implemented. People initially objected, but eventually found it convenient. Standard time helped unify the nation's railroad lines. Additionally, the different gauges of railroad tracks caused inconvenience and delays. Eventually, a standard gauge was adopted to create a national railroad network. Chapter 20, The Sun is No Longer Boss. In the days before the railroad, people did not worry much about being on time. George Washington or Thomas Jefferson did not consider a person late, simply because he arrived 15 or 20 minutes after the time they had agreed on. Benjamin Franklin listed in his autobiography 13 virtues he determined to practice until he became perfect in them. He included sincerity and cleanliness, but he did not include punctuality. In colonial days, it was hard to be on time anyway because watches were expensive and not many people carried them. Most people depended on the clock they saw or heard on the town hall or the church steeple. Grandfather clocks struck the hour and the half hour to tell time to people who had no watches. If you took a trip, there was no regular time table. Stagecoaches left whenever they had arrived from some other place or whenever the driver and the horses were ready. In a stagecoach, on a good road, you might average 5 miles an hour. After the railroads came in, you could average 40! And you could travel on schedule. When trains traveling in opposite directions used a single track, the engineers had to know exactly what time the train was due from the other direction. Then he could ensure he was on the siding to let the other one pass. Trains ran by the minute! Now, with trains speeding from city to city, there were strange new problems that nobody had ever noticed before. The trouble was that every town had its own clock set to its own particular time. The astronomers said that it was noon when you saw the sun reach its zenith, the highest point in the evidence. Since the Earth was constantly in motion, and since the sun rose sooner when you were more to the east, then the definition of noon obviously depended on where you were. Since you saw the sun rise earlier if you were in New York than if you were in Chicago, and still earlier in Chicago than in San Francisco, the time was different in those places! There actually was a difference in the astronomical time between any two places if one was to the west of the other. When it was precisely noon, that is, when the sun had reached its zenith, in Boston it was only 11.56 in the morning, and went Worcester, slightly to the west. And when it was precisely noon in Chicago, it was already 12.06 in Indianapolis, slightly to the east. Cities became as proud about their own time as about the splendor of their city hall or the grandeur of their hotel. In every city, the people said God had given them their own time when he fixed the sun in the heavens. Imagine what this meant for a railroad. The Pennsylvania Railroad tried to use Philadelphia time on its eastern lines, but was five minutes earlier than New York time, and five minutes later than Baltimore time. In Indiana, there were 23 different local times. In Illinois, 27. In Wisconsin, 38. Even in any one town, people disagreed about what time it really was. Each jeweler might have his own special time in which his customers were loyal. To keep businesses running smoothly, and so that people would know when the stores would open and close, and when to meet their appointments, each city somehow had to announce its own time. Some used chimes on a town clock, others blew a whistle or used a ball, called a time ball, held up on a pole in a conspicuous place, which was dropped at the precise moment of noon. Generally, the railroads used the local time for their arrival in each station. In between cities, however, there was great confusion. Yet for the speeding express trains, a few minutes could make the difference between a clear track and a fatal collision. It is not surprising, then, that railroad men were among the first to try to bring order out of this confusion. But it was not easy. If you began tampering with their time, citizens were as outraged as if you tried to change the name of their city, and of course, the astronomers really had a point. If you measured time by the sun in the heavens, then not man but nature had made the confusion, and perhaps no one could do anything about it. But maybe, others said, this way of handling time was only a matter of habit. Suppose people simply stopped using the sun time or astronomical time, and suppose that, instead, they used a new kind of railroad time, a standard time. Suppose you managed to persuade the different cities along the railroad lines and set their clocks to the same time. Take, for example, the train that ran west from Boston to Worcester. Although Worcester's astronomical time was four minutes earlier than Boston's, perhaps the people of Worcester would be persuaded to set their clocks to the same time as those in Boston. For the United States as a whole, you could mark off, on the map, a few conspicuous time belts up and down the whole country. You would only need four, Eastern Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, and Pacific Time. Each several hundred miles wide. Standard time would be exactly the same for all the places within that belt. At the edge of each belt, the time would change by a whole hour. These time belts would be marked on all maps, and then everybody would know exactly what time it was everywhere. It was a sensible plan. But it took many years to persuade Americans. The leaders of the campaign was William Frederick Allen, an energetic man who was not afraid to make enemies. He had seen the confusion when he had been an engineer on the Canadian... on the Camden and Ambroy Railroads just before he joined the staff of the Official Guide of the Railways. And he made time reform the main purpose of his life. Allen aimed to provide a railroad timetable that everybody could understand and could rely on. This would help make railroad travel safer and speedier. The railroads finally agreed to implement this plan for standard time, and it went into effect at noon, November 18, 1893. People everywhere prepared for this dramatic moment. At 1145 in the morning, according to the old Chicago time, conductors and engineers gathered in the lobby of the railroad station in Chicago. With their old-fashioned stem-winding pocket watches in their hands, they looked at the clock on the wall. When the official Chicago railroad clock reached noon, they stopped it. The switch instantly connected it by telegraph wire to the new official clock for the entire central time belt. At what would have been 9 minutes and 32 seconds past noon by the old Chicago time, they then started the clock once more. The railroad men all set their watches, and now everyone was on standard time. Hooray! Ha ha ha! Some people objected. They thought the railroads were trying to take the place of God. It is unconstitutional, warned Mayor Dogberry of Bangor, Maine, being an attempt to change the immutable laws of God Almighty and hard on the working man by changing day into night. He told churches not to ring their bells according to the new standard time. The editor of the Indianapolis Centennial was outraged. The sun is no longer boss of the job. People, 55 million of them, must eat, sleep, and work as well as travel by railroad time. It is a revolt, a rebellion. The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time. By railroad time, people will have to marry by railroad time and die by railroad time. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time. One minister in Tennessee was so disgusted at this effort to take the place of God's own sun, timed that he took a hammer into his pulpit and smashed his watch to pieces just to shock his congregation. But others found reason to be pleased. New York Herald approved. The man who goes to church in New York on November 18th will hug himself with delight to find that the noon service has been curtailed to the extent of nearly four minutes while every old maid on Beacon Hill in Boston will rejoice to discover that she is younger by almost 16 minutes. Gradually, people forgot their outrage. They discovered that it was wonderfully convenient to have standard time. Only one city after another changed its clock to agree with the clock on the railroad station. In 1918, Congress finally gave the Interstate Commerce Commission the legal power to mark off time belts. The government simply followed the time belts that William Frederick Allen had persuaded the railroads to adopt 35 years earlier. Standard time helped to draw all the nation's railroad lines together, but people needed to take other steps too. In 1860, there were about 350 different railroad companies and about 30,000 miles of railroad tracks in the United States. Yet, there was not really a national railroad network. The main reason was that the railroad lines were not on the same gauge. The gauge is the distance between two rails, measured from the inside of one rail to the inside of the other. There were many different gauges. Some railroad builders put their tracks six feet apart. Some put them closer together. There were at least 11 different gauges in general use. A railroad car that would just fit the six-foot gauge would not run on the narrower gauges. If you wanted to send a package any distance by railroad, it had to be taken out of the car that fit one gauge and moved into a car to fit the gauge in the next railroad. In 1861, a package sent by railroad from Charleston, South Carolina to Philadelphia, a distance of about 670 miles, had to change railroad cars eight times! Moving a package from one railroad to another made work for porters and teamsters. At the same time, the passengers who had to wait in the town while they changed trains made business for hotels, restaurants, and storekeepers. Naturally enough, then, town boosters were not anxious to have all railroads in the same gauge. From the beginning, quite a few lines happened to have the same gauge. George Stevenson, the English railroad inventor, had designed his locomotive to measure four feet, eight and a half inches distance between the wheels, the usual distance between wheels of a wagon. When Stevenson locomotives were imported to the United States, they had this standard gauge, and many early railroad lines naturally built up tracks to fit the imported trains. By 1861, about half the railroad tracks in the United States were on the standard gauge. These were mainly in New England and the Middle Atlantic stages, where most of the early railroads had been built. But the other half of American railroad tracks were on every sort of gauge, from about three feet to about six feet. The Civil War brought an urgent need to ship arms and men quickly across the country. The Confederates hastily connected all of the lines that ran into Richmond on standard gauge. Now passengers and freight could go straight through. In the North, too, the war hurried progress. For the first time, through service connected New York City and Washington, D.C. At the end of the war, Americans from the North and South saw the overwhelming advantages of a uniform gauge, and when the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, the railroad. And when the Transcontinental Railroad was completed with standard gauge in 1869, that settled the question. Now if a railroad builder wanted to join the traffic across a continent, he had to set his rails four feet, eight and a half inches apart. Or else! By 1880, about four-fifths of the tracks in the United States were standard gauge. Most of the other gauges were in the old Confederate South. Finally, in 1886, representatives of Southern Railroads decided to change the gauge of all their 13,000 miles of track to the national standard. Month in advance, crews went along loosening the old track. They measured the distance for the new standard gauge and put spikes along the wooden ties. On May 31st and June 1st, 1886, the men worked frantically. One record-breaking crew on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad changed 11 miles of track in four and a half hours. June 1st, 1886 was a holiday along the Southern tracks. By 4 p.m., the Southern Railroads had joined the Union. Thanks for watching!