THE REFORMATION IN TIME-KEEPING. 151 



The action of the raih'oad companies having been assured, the sub- 

 sequent action on the part of city governments became possible as it 

 could not have been otherwise. Of the labor and means employed to 

 secure this action on the part of the railways and the cities it is unne- 

 cessary here to speak. They proved sufficient to accomplish very fully 

 the end desired. More than eighty per cent of all the cities of over 

 ten thousand inhabitants in the United States have adopted standard 

 time. 



The adoption of the new standard required a simultaneous change 

 to be made in the railway-clocks and the watches of employes upon 

 nearly every railroad in the United States and Canada, the change 

 varying from one minute and three seconds on the Pennsylvania Rail- 

 road to forty-five minutes on the Intercolonial Railway of Canada. 

 The exceptions were two roads in the vicinity of New Orleans, and a 

 few lines in the vicinity of Denver. The change was also slight for 

 some of the St. Louis roads. The Intercolonial Railway adopted the 

 time of the seventy-fifth meridian as a matter of convenience, instead 

 of that of the sixtieth meridian, to which its location would have prop- 

 erly assigned it. So perfect were the preparations that not a single 

 accident at any point is recorded as having been caused by the change. 

 On the day when the new standards took effect, the clocks of about 

 twenty thousand railway -stations and the watches of three hun- 

 dred thousand railway employes were reset. Hundreds, perhaps 

 thousands, of city and town clocks were altered to conform. How 

 many individuals reset their watches it is impossible to compute, 

 but they could certainly be reckoned by millions. Probably no 

 such singular incident has ever before happened, or is likely to occur 

 again. 



At the present time, from the Atlantic Ocean at the eastern ex- 

 tremity of New Brunswick, to the Pacific coast at Oregon, the min- 

 ute-hands of the railway clocks and watches indicate the same minute 

 of time at all hours, and fully fifty million people regulate their busi- 

 ness affairs by standard time. 



While a few and for the most part unimportant communities, and 

 some railway companies, did not make the change immediately, so 

 large a majority adopted the system on November 18, 1883, that that 

 date may be fairly taken as the one upon which the reform took effect. 

 Several New England railroads, the Central Vermont Railroad being 

 the most important, commenced to run their trains by " Eastern " 

 standard time on October 7, 1883. The Central and Southern Pacific 

 Railroads west of Ogden and Deming, and their branch lines, are the 

 only railroads in the United States or Canada which do not now use 

 standard time, if we except two purely local roads in Pennsylvania, 

 aggregating less than twenty miles in length. The last to adopt the 

 system were the Union Pacific Railway and the city of Omaha, on 

 May 1, 1884. 



