Clocks Set to Noon When Time Zones Began

It’s called “The Day of Two Noons.” On November 18, 1883, the four time zones across the United States officially began when clocks were reset to precisely 12:00 noon.

Time zones and Standard Time came out of the necessity of railroads to stay on schedule. Train travel kept improving, shrinking the time between cities, and requiring precise arrival and departure times.

Several competing railroad lines crisscrossed the United States. It was a fast-growing industry that moved people and freight each day over thousands of miles of rail lines that covered North America by the 1880s.

Each community the railroads serviced used their own local times within the same state and often between towns that were only a few miles of each other. The complicated time schedules of each railroad line confused travelers. The different railroad companies worked together to end the confusion of dealing with thousands of different times. The competing railroads collaborated to create what became known as Standard Time across the nation.

The railroads looked to the British Empire’s use of Standard Time as an example of how to make the time zone system work. Great Britain was years ahead of America in making time schedules uniform. British railroads were using a standard time system 36 years before American railroads took the lead in 1883.

American railroads established four time zones that crossed the United States one hour apart from each other with the eastern states beginning each day four hours earlier than the western states. Following the movement of the sun, the four zones each covered approximately 25 percent of the country. The railroads named them the Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones.

American railroads coordinated the extremely complicated time changes on that November day in 1883 when all railroad clocks and many thousand city clocks began Standard Time for their particular zones. 

On November 18th, each clock in the Eastern Time Zone was reset to 12:00 noon when the sun was at its highest position in the sky, making that the second time the clock showed noon. Precisely 60 minutes later, clocks in the Central Time Zone were reset at noon. Clocks in the Mountain Time Zone were next, and “The Day of Two Noons” completed its four-hour trek across the continental U.S. in the Pacific Time Zone when clocks there moved to noon.

Within a year, 85% of all U.S. cities with populations of more than 10,000 (approximately 200 cities) used what became known as Standard Time. But paving the way and shouldering the expenses of starting four time zones remained with the commercial railroads for more than 34 and a half years.

The U.S. government finally took over the responsibility of administrating the time zones with the Interstate Commerce Commission when the U.S. Congress made the Standard Time Act a law on March 19, 1918. 

The country’s railroads regulated themselves for more than 34 years concerning the use and revenue requirements of the continental time zones. That would be unheard of in today’s society. The necessity of time zones keeping an accurate measurement of time as the sun passes across our continent extends to all activities in our society.