by R W Owen

Created on: May 31, 2009   Last Updated: June 02, 2009

Imagine arriving at the New York City area's first Penn Station, in 1880, trying to make a train connection, and discovering two clocks, one marked New-York Time and the other marked Philadelphia Time. The difference between the two times? About five minutes - four minutes and 33 seconds, to be precise. To add to the confusion, this Penn Station sat just across the Hudson River from Manhattan in Jersey City, New Jersey, but observed Philadelphia Time, the local time of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Imagine, now, that you made your connection and arrived in Boston with your pocket-watch showing Philadelphia high noon. The pocket-watch of the man on New York City time would show 11:55 AM. Bostonians would tell you that the time was twelve past the hour. A visitor from Lewiston, Maine would show a later time still, 12:14 PM.

Prior to the introduction of Standard Time on November 18, 1883, the United States spanned some 53 different time zones, down from the nearly 100 that had existed some eight years earlier. This multitude of time zones puzzled railroad travelers, forcing them to reset their watches in every town they visited, and complicated railroad travel by requiring travelers to know which time standard applied to which train schedule. Before the Day of Two Noons, as November 18, 1883 has become known, each city and town set its own local time, based largely on the sun's position in the sky. In each town, residents set their watches based on a central clock, located on a church steeple or even in a jeweler's shop window. As transportation, especially railroad transportation, improved through the nineteenth century, the need for standard time zones became more and more apparent.

The Move to Standard Time

The idea to move to standard time belts or zones in the United States was not new in 1883. England had successfully adopted a standard time system some thirty-five years before, in 1848, but the difference in solar time there, from one end of the island to the other, was just 32 minutes. France later followed with similar results. Soon after, U.S. scientists began contemplating a standard time system for the United States, but were soon challenged by the four-hour difference in solar time that existed between easternmost Maine and San Francisco.

In the early 1870's, Professor Charles F. Dowd of Saratoga, New York, proposed the idea of dividing the United States into four standard time zones, each one hour earlier than the zone to its

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