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Selling the True Time - Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Hardcover, Reprinted from)
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Selling the True Time - Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Hardcover, Reprinted from)
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This book studies the transition from local to national
timekeeping, a process that led to Standard Time--the world-wide
system of timekeeping by which we all live. Prior to the railroads'
adoption of Standard Railway Time in 1883, timekeeping was entirely
a local matter, and America lacked any uniform system to coordinate
times and public activities. For example, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, Boston had three authoritative times, which
differed by seconds and minutes.
The story begins in the 1830s with the building of the first
railroads. Since railway safety depended upon maintaining the
temporal separation of trains through precise timing, railroads
were the first to establish time standards to govern their
operations. The railroads' switch to five time standards indexed to
the Greenwich meridian inaugurated the modern era of public
timekeeping and led directly to cities adopting Greenwich-indexed
civil time zones.
Central to the story are those college and university astronomers
who, starting in the 1850s, sold time signals to nearby cities and
railroads. From the start, they competed with other entrepreneurs
trying to make money by selling time. Decades of negotiations,
government lobbying, and battles over customers followed, all in
the name of "public service." Improvements by a host of
clockmakers, civil and electrical engineers, telegraph and railway
technicians, and instrument makers finally changed the market for
accurate time. Public timekeeping became the realm of business
investors.
Despite the efforts of astronomers and various of their
Congressional supporters, who argued for the necessity of a
national system of time authorized by the federal government, the
railroads' success with their own system blocked legislation for a
national system of time until the First World War. By then, a
single source for correct time dominated the public's timekeeping:
the U.S. Naval Observatory's noon signal.
In this first comprehensive, scholarly history of timekeeping in
America, the author has drawn upon a rich, untapped archival
record, municipal and legislative documents, newspapers, and
science and engineering journals to challenge several myths that
have grown up around the subject.
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