Hi. I was showing someone my watches and they asked an interesting question that I am sure some of you can answer.

In today;s world, it is relatively easy to get the exact time. I also remember when I was young the old WWV radio beat frequency for timing.

Did they have a similar system back in the days of the telegraph? How did the average person find out exactly what time it was? How did they do this prior to any communications systems?

Bruce

I am sure someone will give a more researched answer but some of the things I recall was prior to & at the beginning of the railroad system in this country, each town or city had it's own main clock, either a court house clock or church steeple clock. Each town set their clock by the sun.

This worked ok when people traveled by foot or by horse, since traveling from town to town you would find different times based on when it was noon in the town. Once the railroads came along you could actually leave a town & travel a few miles to another town & when you arrived your time & the time of the town would be off.

This also caused confusion & trouble for the railroads, with trying to set a time table for when trains left & arrived at different cities since each place had their own time. Not to mention the danger it posed for trains traveling opposite directions on the same set of tracks.

The major railroads got together & came up with standard time where the nation & Canada were divided up into four time zones. From that point on a lot of the cities & towns adopted the same system but there were towns that refused. They called it railroad time & they were against anyone telling them what time to set their clocks to. I would assume these were mainly non-railroad towns.

This set of time zones didn't become law until I think around 1913 when Daily Light Savings time was being introduced.

Once the telegraph came along every day a few minutes before noon signals were sent out so each place along the line could set their clocks according to the Naval Observatory time. If I remember right there was a certain pattern of signals sent out a minute or two before noon & then a signal at noon. Each day the telegraph lines would go silent for the signals.

There were local jewelers in some towns that advertised that they were also connected to the telegraph & there clocks & watches would have the exact time.

Now all of this is off the top of my head & I may have be off a little but it is the basics. I think the standard times of the railroads were adopted by them some time around 1875.

Tom

Did a bit of web research and found Western Union handled the time signals. Here's an excerpt from an article:

"After about 1865, synchronizing time was traditionally done on the U.S. Railroads and in the larger cities in conjunction with the Western Union standard time signals. Western Union synchronized their main office clocks in the larger cities by telegraph, electrically, with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

These clocks were large weight driven pendulum types and were synchronized daily with the signal from the USNO, and tied into the time service switchboard. This time service switchboard, or "clock board" as it was known, was basically a switchboard terminating loop circuits with special relays, which were cut into Morse wires and city clock circuits to jewelry stores, banks etc. taking battery in that office. Contact closures in the master synchronized clock operated the switchboard clock loops, which in turn sent the signals out over the telegraph wires and clock circuits to the subscribers. At High Noon E.S.T., the standard time signal was thereby transmitted to every office cut in on every telegraph wire. The Western Union synchronized main office clocks furnished the synchronizing signal to the clock board continuously, which sent synchronizing signals to the time service subscribers each hour.

On the Morse wires, the time signal began a couple of minutes before the hour, and came across the wire as a "click" each second, until a few seconds before the exact hour, then a pause, and then a final "click" right exactly at "The Hour". The wire would then close, and be available for regular work. "


For the entire article:

http://www.telegraph-office.com/pages/time.html

Guess my memory was off by 10 years Ed on the adoption of standard time.

I have a couple of the wood cases the Western Union clocks were in but unfortunately the guts were long gone. They did leave the inspection cards in the cases though.

Tom

Hey Tom, you may have been off a little but as they say....It's close enough for government work....

Regards,
Jerry

Well since I have worked for the government since 1974 I would say I have that part down.

Tom

Figured that the telegraph had to play a major part with syncronizing time. It is interesting how a device developed for one purpose also is a major change factor for other issues.

How accurate can one get with a sun dial? A few minutes I would guess.'

Here is a nice article on the Naval observatory and time keeping.

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/history.html