Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
One of the most explicit repercussions of railroads was the standardization
of time. England,
rst to adopt a stand-
ard railroad time: in 1847, the British Railway Clearing House suggested that
all rail stations adopt Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the special preserve of
the Royal Observatory located there, founded in 1675. Because Greenwich
time was distributed via the telegraph wires, it was long known as “railway
time.” For most people, the
fi
first to build railroads, was also the
fi
first experience with standard time was the Great
Exhibition of 1851, to which six million traveled. By 1855 GMT became the
legal standard throughout the country.
In the U.S., given its vastly greater size, a somewhat di
fi
erent set of condi-
tions prevailed. By 1865, the U.S. National Observatory in Washington, DC
sent daily signals to synchronize clocks, of
ff
ering the possibility of national
time (Miller 2002). However, by 1870, the U.S. still had roughly 200 local
times and 80 di
ff
erent railroad times (O'Malley 1990; Fields 1999:66), gener-
ating great confusion among railroad passengers and companies. In that year,
Charles Dowd suggested four time zones based on four standard meridians,
the easternmost of which passed through the U.S. Naval Observatory in
Washington, DC. Uniform time was voluntarily adopted on November 18,
1883, the “day of two noons” because clocks had to be set back to generate a
national railway time. In adopting Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, the U.S.
and Canada provided a model for the international adoption of the same
innovation. This process, however, generated heated debate: opposition to
standard time
ff
flourished in marginal areas in which the discrepancy between
local and standard time was greatest (Bartky 1989), such as Ohio, where
Cincinnati clung tenaciously to its local time as a matter of pride and trad-
ition (O'Malley 1990). Only in 1918 was standard time legally mandated
everywhere across the country.
The accelerating tempo of global industrial capitalism necessitated the
synchronization of multiple national times. The major disagreement was
where to locate the Prime Meridian. Since, unlike the Equator, there is no
“natural” Prime Meridian, the choice was essentially arbitrary, that is to say,
political; after all, any meridian could serve equally well. Prime Meridians
proliferated among many national cities: for the French, Paris; for Spain,
Cadiz; for Russia, Pulkovo, near St. Petersburg; for the Italians, Naples; for
Brazilians, Rio de Janeiro. China used Shanghai time, Russia used a variety
of local times often demarcated from St. Petersburg, and India used hun-
dreds if not thousands of local times announced by gongs and bells (Mill
1892). The search for a Prime Meridian re
fl
ected the Enlightenment concern
with universal knowledge and standardized frames of reference (Schulten
2001:20). In October, 1884, 25 countries sent representatives to the Prime
Meridian Conference hosted by the U.S. State Department in Washington,
DC. The showdown over the Prime Meridian pitted British and American
supporters of Greenwich against French representatives who insisted on
Paris, or failing that, any place but Greenwich. Eventually, Anglo-American
interests prevailed and the conference set Greenwich as the Prime Meridian
fl
Search WWH ::
Custom Search