Today in History: November 18, 1883: Time zones standardized in Canada and USA

As the map shows, we have a lot of time zones in North America. In fact, even if you discount various “daylight saving” or “summer” times (and ignoring some details), we have:

• Alaska time (UTC -9)
• Pacific time (UTC -8)
• Mountain time (UTC -7)
• Central time (UTC -6)
• Eastern time (UTC -5)
• Atlantic time (UTC -4)
• Newfoundland time (UTC -3.5)
• Pierre/Miquelon time (UTC -3)
• East Greenland time (UTC -1)

(In Greenland, you can take a step and have to change your watch by two hours, but East Greenland time is only used in two tiny patches of Greenland).

But it used to be much worse. Until November 18, 1883, each town set its own time, based on their own estimation of solar time. This didn’t really cause too many problems until railroads came in, going from one place to another on a regular schedule that needed to translate across the continent. With the locally set time zones, it was even possible to arrive before you left!

It was chaos!

It was also chaos for telegraph operators who sometimes needed to know the exact time…