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Time out of Mind

"I've never seen such goofy timing," a traveler said to me early this summer. "You' ve got sunrise in the middle of the night and sunset after midnight, into the next day." I tried to explain Alaska's temporal manipulations on the basis of bankers' and stockbrokers' convenience, but he went off mumbling something that sounded like "Capitalist conspiracy."

He was almost right. The ubiquitous and nearly arbitrary time zones with which we live are the residue of decisions made by capitalists in cahoots---the railroad barons of the last century.

That item is among the details to be found in Keeping Watch - A History of American Time, a book written by Michael O'Malley and published in 1990 by Viking Press. The railroads, O'Malley reports, pioneered standardized time zones in the 1880s.

They had to. Local solar time is perfectly adequate for an agricultural society---up at dawn, lunch break when the sun is at its highest, work over when the sky darkens. The irregularities in noon's arrival caused by earth's elliptical orbit or the tilt of its axis were trivial to such societies. Who cared if midday shifted during the year by fifteen minutes or so? The change in overall day length was likely to be far greater over the seasons.

A society involved in urban manufacturing and long-distance transportation runs into trouble on solar time. The workers may be at the factory gate at the crack of dawn, but if the watch-wearing chap in charge of the whistle says they're late, their pay is docked. And who is in charge of being sure the watch is accurate? The railroads magnified such social problems by whisking people through space and time---or at least micro time zones.

If this caused difficulty for passengers worried about missing a train, it caused even more difficulty for railroad workers worried about scheduling. The railroad managers tried all manner of ploys for controlling time and preserving accuracy. One company collected all employees' watches every night, to reset and redistribute them all---now synchronized---the next morning. Some chose the local time of their headquarters as the railroad's standard time. Jewelers provided watches with two minute hands, one for local time and one for railroad time.

These methods were too crude for one German company, which set time posts along the roadbed. Every time a train passed one of these posts, the train's crew had to reset their watches by ten minutes.

In the late 1840s, new astronomical observatories started measuring time by the stars. The railroads wanted to take advantage of this new, more accurate measurement, and provided the chief impetus for a new business: selling the time. Entrepreneurs telegraphed time signals from the observatories to paying subscribers. The railroads now had access to enough accuracy, but they still had to deal with uniformity.

That took them until November 1883, when they introduced the now-familiar standard time zones. And that's exactly how it was: the railroads thought of it, and the railroads enforced it---often over local protests, especially from communities finding themselves a half-hour or more off from sun time. Congress eventually caught up with the capitalists, approving the time zones in 1918.

But Congress is pretty much to blame for starting another arbitrary game we play with solar time. Daylight Saving Time was introduced as a fuel-saving measure during World War I. It too supported the capitalists, so to speak; the middle and upper classes had electric light and more leisure to enjoy the evening, while the workers and farmers had to rise in the dark of morning.

O'Malley notes that some powerful commercial interests, such as makers of sporting goods and backyard barbecues, are even now lobbying to extend Daylight Savings Time. The capitalists, by golly, are still conspiring. It gives one a new perspective on the old saying: Time is Money.