For centuries “time” was a luxury of the rich, and an abstraction for the rest. Farmers and peasants arose when the sun went up, and went to bed as the sun descended. Fixing time across sprawling regions was not necessary because for the most part life was local; each town and city in effect created their own time zone. This frustrated the early rail lines to no end. Britain was first to adopt standard – London – time, and the railroads in the U.S. and Canada were soon to follow.

On this day, November 18, in 1883, pursuant to the General Time Convention adopted a month previously, train operators across North America synchronized their watches to their regional time zone. From countless such zones, the U.S. went down to five.

Not everyone was enthused with the new changes. In Britain, many towns kept two official clocks, for the old time and the new (just as they did for years after the calendar switchover from Julian to Gregorian). Britain’s own government insisted on using old time, creating odd hours for official facilities — imagine polls opening at 8:13. In the U.S., half of the city of Detroit held out on time standardization, and the gridlock forced them to scrap the system altogether and go on solar time altogether. A waggish proposal to erect a sundial at the city square was met with a referral to the Committee on Sewers.