![]() The Connecticut experiment was so successful that railroads across the country saw the wisdom in following suit. The following year, the entire state agreed to use that same time standard. But, in 1880, Connecticut’s railways began leading the way, adopting New York City time. Given the large number of railroad companies in the country, setting up a system was not a simple matter. In the geographically sprawling U.S., it was clear that there would need to be more than one time zone. To solve the problem, Americans looked to England, where the railroads had established a standard time, set at Greenwich Observatory, to use across the entire country. In the extreme case of Pittsburgh, trains used six different time standards for arrivals and departures. ![]() Some train stations had multiple clocks on the walls showing the local times in various nearby cities. The railroads not only brought cities closer together, they also demanded precise timekeeping. People who would once have had to spend weeks traveling from Boston to Washington could now make the trip in less than a day. Between 1830 and the end of the Civil War, the country’s railroad tracks grew from 23 to 35,000 miles. That was a perfectly fine system if you didn’t have to coordinate a conference call with colleagues in another city or tune in to the Super Bowl at the right time-neither of which were an issue before the invention of the radio or telephone.īut another innovation was rapidly connecting cities together. Tiring of 4 pm sunsets, Boston is considering a move to the Atlantic Time Zone.
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