The Day Noon Was Standardised

It is difficult for us to imagine a world in which two neighbouring towns might disagree about what time it was, and yet, until the nineteenth century, that was simply the way things were. Time was local. Noon occurred when the sun stood highest in the sky, which meant that clocks in Bristol ran roughly ten minutes behind those in London, and nobody except the occasional astronomer thought this worth remarking. When travel was limited to the speed of a horse, such discrepancies were of no practical significance. The railways changed that. A train that left one city at a time determined by the local clock and arrived in another with a different notion of the hour created confusion on a grand scale. Timetables had to be accompanied by conversion tables, and passengers missed connections through no fault of their own. In Britain, the Great Western Railway adopted London time for its entire network in 1840, and other companies followed over the next decade, so that "railway time" gradually came to dominate daily life; it was not until 1880, however, that Greenwich Mean Time was made the legal standard throughout the country. The challenge was greater in North America, where the sheer width of the continent meant that the sun's position varied dramatically from coast to coast. By the early 1880s, railroads were operating on dozens of local times. In November 1883, they replaced them with five standard zones, an arrangement implemented on a single day that became known, with some exaggeration, as "the day of two noons", since in the cities where clocks were set back to align with the new system, noon was effectively repeated. Several communities protested at being told what time it was by railway companies; the government did not formally endorse the zones until 1918. Meanwhile, the question of global coordination remained unresolved. In 1884, delegates from twenty-five nations met in Washington for the International Meridian Conference, where, after considerable debate, a large majority voted to adopt the meridian passing through Greenwich as the prime meridian, with France abstaining. The decision did not create a binding worldwide system overnight, and countries adopted standard time at different speeds, but it established the framework on which modern time zones rest. Even today, the system retains its quirks. China, despite spanning the width of five geographical zones, officially keeps a single time. India observes a half-hour offset, and Nepal, in a gesture of independence, keeps its clocks a quarter of an hour ahead of its neighbour's. These oddities remind us that time, which feels like a fact of nature, is in reality an agreement, negotiated and renegotiated by people who needed to arrive at the same station at the same hour.