Sunday, November 07, 2010

The change in time today reminds me of one of the many things I learned from William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis

Until the railroads came to prairie towns after the Civil War, each town set its clock using the sun.  It was  impossible to run railroads under such circumstances, and so railroads developed "standard time zones," for the United States.  They became the standard well before they were codified into law.