How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. When Did Americans Start Recycling? Beatlemania Sweeps the United States. How Did 'Taps' Originate? Why is Oklahoma nicknamed the Sooner State? Judeo-Christian societies learned to perceive historical time as linear and unidirectional because of a particular story they told themselves about the fate of humankind.
The Inca and the Mayans drew different cosmologies from different tales, cyclical and continuous. Time, in other words, has always been a product of the human imagination—and a source of tremendous political power. Julius Caesar knew this when he reshuffled the Roman calendar in 46 B. Joseph Stalin thought the weekend was a bourgeois luxury; he abolished it in in a bid to transform ordinary Russians into good Communists.
Our modern timekeeping regime was born at the end of the 19th century. It was also a moment of great technological progress. Railways, steamships, subways, telephones, and radio thundered into existence all at once, collapsing distance and compressing time in ways that dazzled and disoriented. Technology also forced greater precision of calculation and measurement. Many Westerners felt that globalization required more accurate and predictable ways of measuring time. Timekeeping was a messy and bewildering business in most parts of the 19th-century world.
American railways recognized 75 different local times in ; three of those were in Chicago alone. In Germany, travellers had to clarify whether departures were according to Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Ludwigshafen, or Frankfurt time.
By the end of the century, this maddening variety of competing local times was making it difficult to transport everything from spices to armies.
Clashing calendars made the headaches even worse. Until revolutionaries jettisoned the Julian calendar in , Russia was 13 days behind western Europe. Islamic societies counted years from C. This was the dream articulated by Scottish-Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming and officially adopted by diplomats at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D. Time calculation became a serious problem for people traveling by train sometimes hundreds of miles in a day , according to the Library of Congress.
Every city in the United States used a different time standard, so there were more than local sun-times to choose from. Railroad managers tried to address the problem by establishing railroad time zones, but this was only a partial solution to the problem. Operators of the new railroad lines needed a new time plan that would offer a uniform train schedule for departures and arrivals. Four standard time zones for the continental United States were introduced on November 18, Britain, which already adopted its own standard time system for England, Scotland, and Wales, helped gather international consensus for global time zones in Various meridians were used for longitudinal references among different countries before the late s, and the Greenwich Meridian was the most popular of these.
Moreover, the shipping industry would benefit from having just one prime meridian. Many people informally recognized the Greenwich Meridian as the prime meridian before the International Meridian Conference in Trains had made the old system - where major cities and regions set clocks according to local astronomical conditions - obsolete.
Fleming advocated the adoption of a standard or mean time and hourly variations from that according to established time zones. He was instrumental in convening the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, at which the system of international standard time - still in use today - was adopted. The use of standard time gradually increased because of its obvious practical advantages for communication and travel. Standard time in time zones was established by U.
Congress adopted standard time zones based on those set up by the railroads, and gave the responsibility to make any changes in the time zones to the Interstate Commerce Commission, the only federal transportation regulatory agency at the time. When Congress created the Department of Transportation in , it transferred the responsibility for the time laws to the new department.
Time zone boundaries have changed greatly since their original introduction and changes still occasionally occur. The Department of Transportation conducts rulemakings to consider requests for changes. Generally, time zone boundaries have tended to shift westward.
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