Tag Archives: time zones

Chicago as the epicenter for the creation of American time zones

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When Americans decided on time zones in the late 1800s, where did they gather to formalize the boundaries and clocks? Chicago, a railroad center:

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Until 1883, a Chicagoan asked to tell what time it was could give more than one answer and still be correct.

There was local time, determined by the position of the sun at high noon at a centrally located spot in town, usually City Hall. There was also railroad time, which put Columbus, Ohio, six minutes faster than Cincinnati and 19 minutes faster than Chicago. Scattered across the country were 100 different local time zones, and the railroads had some 53 zones of their own.

To do away with the inevitable confusion, the railroads took the matter into their own hands, holding a General Time Convention in the fall of 1883 at the Grand Pacific Hotel at LaSalle Street and Jackson Boulevard. (Today, a plaque at the location — which is just north of the Chicago Board of Trade Building — notes its significance).

Its purpose: to develop a better and more uniform system of railroad scheduling. The Standard Time System — based on the mean solar time at the central meridian of each time zone — was formally inaugurated on Nov. 18, 1883, a day that came to be known as the “Day of Two Noons.”

Another summary of the same story ended this way:

But it was an astonishingly rapid and successful shift, syncing up almost the entire country in the space of a week, with all roads leading back to Chicago.

Three interrelated features of Chicago stand out to me as contributing to being the place where time zones were agreed upon:

  1. A railroad center with numerous major railways running in and through the city and region.
  2. Business leaders, specifically railroad leaders, pushing for standard time zones in order to help their commercial activity. Chicago was a center for commerce and industry.
  3. The ease of getting in and out of Chicago – lots of railroads, central location in the United States – helped facilitate a meeting there.

These features of Chicago still hold today. The city continues to be a railroad center with lots of traffic throughout the region. It is still a business center, a leading global city. And it still serves as a transportation hub. Just as the railroad executives found it a good place to gather, see the number of important meetings that take place near O’Hare Airport, in the city, and throughout the region.

Might such a meeting in 1883 taken place elsewhere? Perhaps. If something as consequential as time zones were to be decided in 2025, which American city might we expect to host the discussion: the political center of Washington, D.C.? The leading global city of New York? The tech capital in San Francisco?

Almost half of Americans live in the Eastern time zone; what effect does this have?

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One time zone in the United States has the largest percentage of residents living in it:

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I moved here from eastern, which is the nation’s anchor time zone. I say that not because of its affiliation with New York City or Washington, D.C., but because almost half the U.S. population holds to its authority. Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Atlanta are on eastern time, along with almost all of Florida and Michigan, the whole of Ohio, and other less notable places made more notable simply by their participation in the most normal time in America.

Eastern time starts the day; it sets the pace for the nation. The stock market opens on Wall Street, corporate lawyers file into Back Bay offices, spoons swirl café cubanos in Miami. It’s morning again in America. On the other coast, where it’s three hours earlier, nobody cares. Such is the glory of the Pacific time zone, which houses a smaller sliver of the country’s population—just 16 percent or so. Some West Coasters—surfers, almond farmers, theme-park vendors—may be up during the eastern a.m. hours, though not because investment bankers or media professionals compel them. But the whole Atlantic Seaboard morning has elapsed by the time that most Pacific-time professionals have stumbled to the office, smoothies in hand. They will always be behind, no matter what they do. This is not a disadvantage; it’s a lifestyle.

I am confused by the conflation of time zones – a concept invented by humans relatively recently to try to cope with the modern world – and influence. The eastern time zone does have a lot of people. This is notable. This means there is a lot of activity that affects people in the rest of the country and the world. (Is this nearly half figure similar to the number showing a big majority of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border with the United States?)

This sounds like a testable hypothesis: do certain time zones have particular advantages due to a competitive edge, historical patterns, and/or perceptions about time zones? Are there notable examples of countries or places where the east to west gradient of influence is not true or opposite?

And what happens in settings where the interaction or collaboration occurs around the globe? How much does it matter that Asia or Europe are earlier in the day than the United States when doing international work?

How time zone boundaries can affect cultural practices

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Time zones help keep social life across the world consistent but they can have different effects on social life within each time zone:

Now, Google engineer Stefano Maggiolo has visualized what this difference looks like around the world—how solar time lags behind or marches in front of the time on the clock. It’s a rare look at the rhythm of the day—measured and made uniform by technology—affects communities around the world…

Of course, the reasons for standardization are often as sociological as they are technological—and their effects wind up redounding beyond their intent. As Joshua Keating writes at Slate, Spain standardized on central European time during Franco’s reign. This, in turn, led to later schedules in Spain, and to the nation’s famously nocturnal suppers.

“At the time I’m writing, near the winter solstice, Madrid’s sunset is around 17:55, more than an hour later than the sunset in, for example, Naples, which is at a similar latitude,” writes Maggiolo.

It was Spain’s extreme offset that led to Maggiolo’s writing the story.

China, too, uses a single time zone across its territory, which works for the country’s more urban east but hurts the country’s rural west. India does the same—to, as it happens, the opposite effect. In India’s easternmost state, the summer sun can rise as early as 4:30 a.m.

Some historians argue that the invention of the clock and the subsequent development of clock time had a profound effect on civilization. But, tweaking time zones, whether countries want to have a single zone or want to be half an hour off or areas don’t want to switch for Daylight Savings Time (we experienced this in northwestern Indiana so half the year we were on eastern time, half on central time), can lead to some different outcomes and social patterns. In these instances, time can serve nationalistic (in the case of having a single time zone for one country) or economic (the northwest corner of Indiana is on central time and not eastern time like the rest of the state to maintain its ties to Chicago) purposes.

This makes me think that it would be pretty interesting to study people and communities right at the edges of these zones. If India and China have different single time zones, what happens at their border where there is a substantial 2.5 hour difference? Even consistently traversing a one hour time different in the U.S. within one metropolitan area could be interesting.