#Time zones map how to

In the United States, amateur astronomer William Lambert lobbied Congress for time standardization as early as 1809. A few holdouts used a pair of minute hands-one for local time, the other for GMT-and the legal and electoral system followed local “sun time” until 1880. The Royal Observatory transmitted its first telegraph signal for setting clocks on August 23, 1852, and by the mid-1850s, most public clocks in Britain were set to GMT.

In 1847, the Railway Clearing House recommended switching to GMT. In 1840, the Great Western Railway became the first to adopt London time, and most railroads soon followed suit. How Railroads Created Time ZonesĮngland’s railroads also needed standardization for their timetables. Each town in England, however, continued to set its own clocks by the sun. In 1764, John Harrison perfected the use of clocks to determine a ship’s east-west position at sea. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, established Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in 1675 as an aid to mariners in determining longitude. This inconsistency was the impetus for standardization, made possible by the telegraph.Īnother mode of transportation-the sailing ship-inspired the earliest efforts to standardize time. The railroads had been struggling with 100 different local time zones of their own devising. 18, 1883-the “day with two noons”-most places in the continental United States adopted the system of four time zones originally known as Standard Railway Time. When your clocks “spring forward” or “fall back” with Daylight Saving Time, take a moment to observe the birthday of America’s standard time zones. “Sun time” differs by four minutes for every degree of longitude, making New York and Boston eight minutes apart. Estimates of the number of these local “time zones” range from 300 to 8,000 across the United States alone. ( Wikimedia Commons)ĭoes anybody really know what time it is? For our ancestors, the answer depended on where they were, with each town’s official clock-typically on a church or city hall-set by the sun, which would be overhead at noon each day. This map shows the railroads’ time zones five years earlier, in 1913.

The Standard Time Act in 1918 formally established four US time zones.

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#Time zones map how to

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