Fifty Standard Years

Unmarked by pomp and speechmaking on the part of the railroads, and almost unnoticed by the traveling public, was the 50th anniversary last week of that major convenience. Standard Time. Only a hand-ful of rheumy oldtime railroaders could recall the nightmare of conflicting clocks & watches that was banished forever one November day in 1883.

In the peaceful days before locomotives chuffed clear across the land, no one found it awkward that every sizeable town had it? own time, set by the local noon. Visitors who journeyed 40 or 50 mi. from home by horse & buggy usually remained at their destination long enough not to mind shifting their watches a few minutes. But as the railroad network grew, the time situation became grotesque. The railroads had no less than 49 different time systems. Some stations exhibited three clocks, one for eastbound trains, one for westbound trains, one for local time. Drummers covering southern New England carried watches with two minute hands, one for Boston time, one for Manhattan time.

Dr. Charles Ferdinand Dowd, principal of a seminary in Saratoga Springs. N. Y.. first thought of a way to end the time nightmare. He presented his zone system to a railroad convention in 1869. Not until 14 years later did the roads divide the U. S. into four time zones--Eastern, Central, Mountain. Pacific--one hour apart and spaced by meridians 15DEG apart in longitude. By then the Dowd idea had been turned over to William F. Allen, secretary of the American Railway Association, and to him has gone most of the credit for Standard Time in the U. S. Dr. Dowd saw most of the credit for dividing the whole world into 24 time zones go to Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian railway engineer and university chancellor. As a final irony. Dr. Dowd was killed in a grade-crossing accident in 1904.

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