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In a few hours, the world will start marking the entry into a new year. Here in the Great Land, it will only be 8 p.m. when the ball drops in New York City; Hawaii won’t see 2024 until an hour after Alaska. Nowadays, we take this kind of thing for granted, but ’twas not always thus.
Time was when every county courthouse boasted a tower, at the top of which was a four-sided clock, with one face aimed at the primary points of the compass, so the town’s time was visible to all. Most of these clocks were run by a single clockwork connected to all four faces, which I only know because my brother had a side business for some years repairing those clocks all around the upper Midwest. For many years, those clocks, as well as people’s clocks and watches, were set to a local “sun time,” calibrated by marking high noon each day, and noon was often marked by a bell being rung or a whistle blown.
The introduction of railroads changed a lot, including time; with every town having its own time, marked at the sun’s zenith, scheduling was a mess.Â
Enter Charles F. Dowd.
Charles F. Dowd tamed time.
The career educator conceived a plan so audacious it’s hard to believe there was an era when his vision for the world didn’t exist. Â
Dowd created time zones. He put the rotation of the Earth, the rise of the sun, the movement of the heavens and the genesis of eternity itself on an artificial schedule for the benefit of mankind.
“To regulate the time of this Empire Republic of the World is an undertaking of magnificent proportions,” the Indianapolis Sentinel wrote on Nov. 21, 1883, three days after railroads instituted time zones across North America.
Granted, the standardization of time would have happened one way or another; Mr. Dowd just happened to design the system that worked and was eventually adopted worldwide. We recalcitrant Americans came late to the party, not legally adopting the time zone system until 1918, during the Great War, but the railroads bought into the new system in 1883, as it made schedule-keeping a lot easier.
Dowd’s new system wasn’t without its detractors.
“The mayor of Bangor, Maine, threatened jail time for anyone ringing church bells using the new Standard Time hours,” the Madison Historical Society reports.
“An impassioned preacher in Tennessee smashed his own pocket watch at the pulpit, decrying the railroad’s interference with ‘God’s time.’”Â
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Uncle Sam proved to be way behind schedule on time zones, too.Â
“Five days before Standard Time was to go into effect, the Attorney General of the United States issued an edict that government departments had no right to adopt railroad time until authorized to do so by Congress,” wrote [author Carlton J.] Corliss.
That happened in 1918, as noted; of course, it wasn’t long before Congress took a good thing and proceeded to start messing around with it by introducing Daylight Savings Time.
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In one of history’s little ironies, Charles Dowd was killed in 1904 when he stepped in front of a train; history has not recorded whether or not that train was running on time.
And so, when we celebrate the new year, we are celebrating an event marked by the Gregorian calendar adopted in 1582, at the close of a 24-hour day devised by the ancient Egyptians and codified now in ISO 8601, calibrated to a time zone system developed by an American, Charles Dowd.
It’s interesting to see the patchwork of traditions and standards that a modern society makes.
In a few hours, 2023 will be behind us. It’s been an eventful year, and 2024 is shaping up to be likely even more so. But today, we celebrate this year that we finally, thankfully, gratefully put behind us – and look ahead to the next with a mixture of hope and apprehension.
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So, when you hoist a glass of the beverage of your choice this evening, take a moment to reflect on a great and yet-unsung American, Charles Dowd, who calibrated the clock of the world.
