I have always wondered...way back in the 1800's how did anyone know the right time? I know people use to go to the bank and set their watches by the bank regulator, but how did the bank get the right time? Lets say before there were telephones. After all, the bank regulator must have lost or gained a few seconds a week and therefore, was off several minutes in due time. Just wondering????

From what I have read there were so many different times throughout the continent that railroad time was invented to try to over come so many different times.

I have read that each town determined their time based on the solar noon, so in some towns one jeweler would have a sun dial & everyone would set there time according to his time. Or a town would have another person responsible for determining when none was, but this lead to a town a few miles away having a different time that the next town. Before the railroads this didn't really matter since you either traveled by foot or by an animal, if one town was 15 minutes different that the town you left from, by the time you got there it didn't really matter. Some examples were that in Michigan there were 27 different time zones, 38 in Wisconsin & 27 in Illinois.

When the railroads came it all changed, there needed to be some sort of uniform time since the train could travel faster. They needed away to set up time schedules and arrange for trains going different directions to be out of each others way.

So basically from what I have read until the railroad time zones came into effect, some where in each town the time was determined by a sun dial & then maybe everybody got the time from that person of the city clock was set by the sun dial & everyone got their time from it.

You know the first clocks & watches only had a hour hand, minutes were just not as important back then as we seem to think they are today.

So that is what little bit I know about this subject.

Tom

US Naval Observatory began transmitting time signals to Washington D.C. in 1865 by telegraph, with the natural extension of this service via Western Union telegraph lines to railroads all across the nation. This proved an excellent solution to the time problem, as the nearly instantaneous transmission of time signals over the telegraph wires allowed electrical or manual synchronizing of clocks and watches at any point the telegraph wires reached.

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.

Thanks Tom...this clears up a lot of what I was wondering. I would guess that with sun dials, time was a bit different as one would go east or west...but that wouldn't matter much as there wasn't a fast travel method anyway. The good ole sun....guess I will get my old sundial out and set my watches/clocks with that

Sam

Back in the day...if one wanted to sleep in a bit before going to work....just tweek the sun dial a bit the night before

I think not to many people actually had to punch a time clock, a good portion of this country was self employed, either on their farm or their blacksmith shop or whatever, the exact time was just not that important. Sometimes I wish it was possible to go back to that type of life.

Exactly Tom! Sunrise & sunset defined the work day, no need for time clocks to punch!