The American railroad industry put Fleming’s time scheme into practice five years later, and the federal government made it official with the Calder Act. His plan carved the planet in 24 equal “time zones,” each deviating by one additional hour from the time at zero degrees longitude.īecause the zero longitude line cut through the town of Greenwich, England, Fleming called the time there “Greenwich Mean Time.” That standard, GMT for short, remains the worldwide “mean” time today, though there are now 38 time zones around the world, many of which vary from GMT by 30 minutes, or some other figure, rather than a single hour. But in 1878, a Canadian-Scottish inventor and engineer named Sir Sanford Fleming brainstormed the idea of standardizing time worldwide. When railroads suddenly made it possible for Americans to traverse hundreds of miles in a matter of hours, the disparities in time between destinations became unwieldy, and railroads simply could not set reliable schedules. By the time travelers arrived at a new destination, the precise time when they departed hardly mattered. This anarchic approach to time worked just fine in an era when transportation was by wagon, horseback or on foot. Each city or town set its own clocks based more or less on the position of the sun in the sky. Prior to 1883, the country had no time zones. into four time zones-zones that were established in 1883 by the country’s railroad executives, who needed to set schedules that everyone could easily follow. Known as the Standard Time Act, it established as federal law the division of the continental U.S. 1, 1918, the Calder Act (named for its author, Republican New York Senator William Calder) took effect, after its passage by Congress the previous June. Nothing ‘Standard’ About ‘Standard Time’ Until 1918 To understand why, we have to travel back in time, as it were, to the beginnings of this odd notion that time should be moved around twice every year. Why has California, despite the will of the voters, stuck with daylight saving time? Not to mention the other 18 states that also voted to abolish the time change but now keep it anyway. As for Hawaii, the 50th state is located so near to the equator that each day is basically the same length at any time of year. In Arizona the legislature decided in 1968 that the days there were hot enough without adding an extra hour of glaring desert sun.

Arizona and Hawaii are the exceptions, both for good reasons.

Yet in 2021, California, like all but two other states, is still switching over to daylight saving time every March, then back to standard time in November. Carried by about 20 percentage points, 60-40, the 2018 measure authorized the state legislature to abolish the twice-annual time shift. A century later, California’s voters passed a ballot measure, Proposition 7, to get rid of the clock change altogether. Named “daylight saving time,” this practice dates back to 1918 in the United States. Time goes forward in the springtime, and back an hour in the autumn months. What is the nature of time? That sounds like a question best contemplated by dorm-room stoners, but the answer affects our lives daily-especially on the two days per year when Americans, and people in 70 countries around the world, engage in the strange practice of shifting time itself by one hour.

Time california