Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in AmericaStanford University Press, 2000 - 310 pages This book studies the transition from local to national timekeeping, a process that led to Standard Time--the world-wide system of timekeeping by which we all live. Prior to the railroads adoption of Standard Railway Time in 1883, timekeeping was entirely a local matter, and America lacked any uniform system to coordinate times and public activities. For example, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Boston had three authoritative times, which differed by seconds and minutes. The story begins in the 1830s with the building of the first railroads. Since railway safety depended upon maintaining the temporal separation of trains through precise timing, railroads were the first to establish time standards to govern their operations. The railroads switch to five time standards indexed to the Greenwich meridian inaugurated the modern era of public timekeeping and led directly to cities adopting Greenwich-indexed civil time zones. Central to the story are those college and university astronomers who, starting in the 1850s, sold time signals to nearby cities and railroads. From the start, they competed with other entrepreneurs trying to make money by selling time. Decades of negotiations, government lobbying, and battles over customers followed, all in the name of "public service. Improvements by a host of clockmakers, civil and electrical engineers, telegraph and railway technicians, and instrument makers finally changed the market for accurate time. Public timekeeping became the realm of business investors. Despite the efforts of astronomers and various of their Congressional supporters, who argued for the necessity of a national system of time authorized by the federal government, the railroads success with their own system blocked legislation for a national system of time until the First World War. By then, a single source for correct time dominated the public s timekeeping: the U.S. Naval Observatory s noon signal. In this first comprehensive, scholarly history of timekeeping in America, the author has drawn upon a rich, untapped archival record, municipal and legislative documents, newspapers, and science and engineering journals to challenge several myths that have grown up around the subject. |
Contents
Introduction | |
True Time and Place | |
Running on Time | |
Telegraphing Time Making History | 7 |
Introducing City Time | 14 |
Antebellum Observatory Time Services | 22 |
Lobbying for Time and New Technologies | 22 |
Abbes Road Uniform Time | 36 |
A Failure in Time | 52 |
New Companies Old Business | 52 |
Two InstrumentMakers | |
The Time Peddlers | |
A Severe Blow to the Progress of Science | |
Epilogue | |
American Observatory Public Time Services | |
Notes | |
Common terms and phrases
Abbe Abbe's adopted Albany Allegheny Observatory Allen Annual Report April Archives astronomers Bache ball Bartky began Bond Bond's Boston Chicago Chicago Astronomical Society chronograph chronometers Cincinnati city's Cleveland Abbe clock system Coast Survey Committee company's Congress country's Dearborn Observatory December devices distribution dollars Dowd Dudley Observatory Electric Clock February Fire Alarm Gardner Gould Greenwich Hamblet Harvard College Observatory HCO-HUA Holden January Langley's letter longitude longitude difference marine chronometers meridian minutes Moses Farmer National Navy Notes to Chapter November observations observatory directors Observatory Time Services October Office operating patent Payne pendulum Pickering Pritchett proposal public timekeeping rail railroad timekeeping Records regulate Rodgers Samuel Langley Scientific secretary Self-Winding Clock Company servatory Sidereal Messenger Signal Service Standard Railway station superintendent synchronizer Telegraph Company time-service timekeeping transmitting tronomer U.S. Coast U.S. Coast Survey U.S. Naval Observatory uniform University USNO-NA Waldo Walker Washington watch Western Union William wires wrote Yale