Time Jumps Around

I'm not quite sure what to make of Daylight Savings Time - are you?

Daylight saving time, which begins on Sunday, is unsettling... Winding the clock forward in March and back in November is like biannually changing the measure of an inch.

This tinkering with clocks is our inheritance from a people obsessed with time. Clocks spread rapidly in early America... But all these clocks were like many Americans themselves: individual, conforming to their own notions. There were hundreds of local times, each city setting its city hall or courthouse clock to match its own solar noon. When it was 12 p.m. in Chicago, it was 11:50 a.m. in St. Louis and 12:18 p.m. in Detroit. But that wasn’t a problem because local time was all that mattered.

That changed when the railroads began to unify the country. The railroads ran by their own time, which vexed travelers trying to make connections. Many stations had two clocks, one for railroad time and one for local time.

To eliminate the confusion, railroads took it upon themselves in 1883 to divide the country into four time zones, with one standard time within each zone...

That explains it. The Railroads messed up our sense of time.

Be sure to set your clock ahead tonight!
GHT