If you question whether or how railroads completely revolutionized American life in the nineteenth century, you need only look at your watch. Nearly all Americans wear watches. Our lives are built around tight schedules for school, work and play. When we cross time zones, we change our watches to local time. We are slaves to time.

It wasn’t always that way. Americans haven’t always meticulously tracked time by the minute. In fact, keeping time in the days of trail travel to Oregon and California was much easier. It only needed to be measured casually by noting the position of the sun or by marking off each passing day.

The system of timekeeping used in North America today is an artificial creation. Composed of the Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern, and Atlantic time zones (in maritime Canada), the system was created by the railroads. It was invented to resolve the confusion caused by dozens of local time standards, hundreds, in fact.

Determining time based on the sun’s position had worked well for countless generations. Nothing more was needed when people traveled no faster than a spirited team of horses or a swift sailing ship (if they traveled at all beyond their home villages). But the old system no longer worked for train travelers. It created confusion in a world that railroads caused to grow smaller by the day.

Railroad managers wanted only to schedule their trains safely over single-track lines -- the kind used across most of America. That was impossible except by imposing a system of time discipline, and educating employees to follow timetables to the minute.

Failure to observe accurate time could have deadly consequences. It could result in a bloody head-on collision between two speeding trains accidentally occupying the same section of track at the same time. This was the kind of headline accident every railroad engineer feared most.

A growing number of long-distance travelers cared about accurate timekeeping, too. The numerous local time standards caused confusion that resulted in tight connections and missed trains.

These were some of the reasons railroad managers, acting without support from governments at any level, conspired to solve the problem. They introduced railroad time zones on November 18, 1883 -- the so-called day of "two noons." Taking his cue from the railroad managers, Governor Thomas Crittenden encouraged Missourians to set their clocks and watches to Central Time.1

It is a revolution, a revolt, a rebellion, anarchy, chaos. Across the nation, there were pockets of resistance. To the critics, the action by railroad managers was highhanded. It was seen as typical of the growing power of railroads to shape all phases of human existence. "Railroad time is to be the time of the future," grumbled the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. "The sun is no longer to boss the job. People -- 55,000,000 of people -- must eat, sleep and work as well as travel by railroad time."

The diehards kept their clocks and watches set on local time, but they were fighting a losing battle and they knew it. An Indianapolis newspaper protested: "It is a revolution, a revolt, a rebellion, anarchy, chaos. The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time. People will have to marry by railroad time, and die by railroad time. Banks will open and close by railroad time. And it is useless to ask, 'What are you going to do about it?'"2

Symbolically, U.S. and Canadian railroads had changed something very fundamental. They had collectively taken upon themselves a form of power that for millennia had belonged solely to nature. What was the brave new world defined by railroads coming to?