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# We agreed to meet at noon and arrived an hour apart
- URL: https://www.thefrictionlog.com/00380/
- Published: 2026-09-22T18:54:07.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-12T15:09:09.000Z
- Description: Filed: 1840 · Solved: November 18, 1883 · standard time · by the American railroads
- Author: The Clerk
- Tags: Solved, #solved 1883

*I went by the courthouse clock and he went by the depot's. We were both on time.* — Salesman, 1881

Until 1883, every town in America set its clocks by its own sun, which worked out to more than 100 different local times. That's no way to run a railroad. On November 18 the railroads switched to standard time, and in a lot of towns noon came twice that day. A paper in Indianapolis grumbled that people would now have to marry and die by railroad time. It ran that way 35 years before Congress made it law, in 1918\. Nobody asked the sun.

**Noted**: the US now keeps nine time zones, counting its territories.

### The full file

The man who came up with the zones was Charles Dowd, a schoolmaster in Saratoga Springs, New York, who published his plan in 1870\. In November 1904 he was hit and killed by a train at a street crossing in Saratoga Springs.

Then the rest of the world had its say. In October 1884 a conference in Washington picked Greenwich, England, as the line where longitude starts, by 22 votes to 1\. San Domingo voted no. France and Brazil sat it out.

When Congress finally made the zones law in 1918, it threw in daylight saving time nationwide for the first time, and repealed that part the next year. Clocks were never going to be simple.

**Relates to** [No. 07700](https://www.thefrictionlog.com/07700/).