276 



NA TURE 



{Jan. 22, 1885 



from an esteemed correspondent, which will show at once 

 the history of this movement and what has come of it. 



I. On November 18, 1883, the principal railway lines 

 of the United States and Canada adopted a new method 

 of computing and recording time, for the purpose of 

 securing a uniform time standard which should simplify 

 the business of transportation and add to the convenience 

 of travellers. It is almost wholly for purposes of travel 

 and transportation that the majority of people have need 

 of accurate time, and everywhere, except in very large 

 cities, business has always been regulated by railroad 

 time. 



II. The defects of the old system of time standards were 

 mainly as follows : — 



(1) There wers formerly more than fifty standards of 



railway time in the United States. Now there are but 

 four. 



(2) The old standards differed from each other, where 

 they intersected, by all sorts of variations, errors, and odd 

 minutes. Now the differences between the standards are 

 an exact hour, and the minutes and seconds are the same 

 in all four divisions. 



(3) Formerly there were almost innumerable places at 

 which standards changed. Now the points of change are 

 few in number, and always at prominent points of railway 

 departure. 



(4) Formerly almost every railway centre had two or 

 three standards of time. Chicago used three ; Kansas 

 City had five ; and St. Louis, where fourteen roads centre, 

 used six different standards. 







„ Calgary 



^vJtlnNew ' Vestminster 



III. In the plan which has now been]adopted it was 

 proposed : — 



(1) That the same standard should govern as many 

 railroads as possible. 



(2) That the standards should not extend over so large 

 an area of territory as to cause standard time to differ at 

 any point by more than about thirty minutes from local 

 time (mean solar time). 



(3) That each standard should vary from the adjacent 

 standards by the most readily-calculated difference, that 

 of an even hour. 



(4) That changes from one standard to another should 

 be made at well-known points of departure. 



(5) That these changes should be made at the termini 

 of roads where changes naturally occur, except on the 

 transcontinental lines, and in a few other unavoidable 



Stafford's Geog Estab 



cases, where they should be made at the ends of 

 divisions. 



(6) That the 75th meridian west from Greenwich 

 being almost precisely the central meridian for the 

 system of roads using standards based upon the time 

 of eastern cities, and the 90th meridian being equally 

 central for the roads running by the time of western cities, 

 the time of those meridians should be adopted for the 

 territory which includes nearly 90 per cent, of our whole 

 railway system. The hour meridians east and west of 

 those named (the 60th on the east, and the 105th and 

 1 20th on the west) were found to be equally well adapted 

 as central meridians for the roads in the section of 

 country adjacent thereto. 



IV. The problem in this country presented a feature 

 nowhere else encountered. Standard time was introduced 



