Railway time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time

by perihelions • 3 years ago

94 45 3 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

greenyoda• 3 years ago

Interesting that by 1855, they had a sort of "Network Time Protocol" running over telegraph lines:

By 1852 a telegraph link had been constructed between a new electro-magnetic clock at Greenwich and initially Lewisham, and shortly after this London Bridge stations. It also connected via the Central Telegraph Station of the Electric Time Company in the City of London, which enabled the transmission of a time signal along the railway telegraphic network to other stations. By 1855 time signals from Greenwich could be sent through wires alongside the railway lines across the length and breadth of Britain.[1]

By the late 19th Century, they had invented "master clocks":

Between the late 1800s and the availability of Internet time services, many large institutions that depended on accurate timekeeping such as schools, offices, railway networks, telephone exchanges, and factories used master/slave clock networks. These consisted of multiple slave clocks and other timing devices, connected through wires to a master clock which kept them synchronized by electrical signals. The master clock was usually a precision pendulum clock with a seconds pendulum and a robust mechanism. It generated periodic timing signals by electrical contacts attached to the mechanism, transmitted to the controlled equipment through pairs of wires.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time#Influence_of_the_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_clock#History

bruce5114• 3 years ago

> The railway companies sometimes faced concerted resistance from local people who refused to adjust their public clocks to bring them into line with London Time.

The cynic in me doesn't find this even mildly surprising. Faced with an inevitable outcome, which had clear benefits, with no discernable down-sides [1], the population still managed to find the time, energy and will to fight.

This stubbornness seems to be baked into the human condition, this "they can't tell we what to do" sounds suspiciously like small child having a tantrum.

As their world changed, it brought about new challenges, which required cooperation to solve. And it was the cooperation rather than the solution which proved to be a stumbling block.

I'm working hard to resist ending this note with a highly sarcastic sentence.

[1] the differences being small, typically 15 mins or so.

RangerScience2• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State has a whole bunch about how towns protect themselves from centralized authorities by being less comprehensible / requiring local knowledge to navigate. It’s one of the ways that power balances were maintained.

So the downside is “you can more effectively yield your power here”, or more specifically: “you can take more in taxes and conscription.”

Centralized time might be pretty small in the scheme of centralization - and come with numerous other benefits - but, that generalized resistance doesn’t come from nowhere, or irrationality, or stupidity.

IMHO it’s not that “don’t tell me what to do” is baked into the human condition, it’s that we bake into our condition that when people tell you what to do, it’s better for them and not necessarily better for you.

bruce5114• 3 years ago

I'm not against fighting the good fight, when one side wins and the other loses. But fighting "just because" the other side has a position seems counter-productive.

If we make decisions, to our own detriment, purely to be in opposition, then I think that's irrational.

It's hard to give an example that won't immediately derail this conversation, precisely because every topic seems to be judged on what position the other side has, but its not hard to see this play out every day.

sdeframond• 3 years ago

Seeing Like A State seems interesting, Thank you for the reference.

From the Wikipedia article:

A main theme of this book [...] is that states operate systems of power toward 'legibility' in order to see their subjects correctly in a top-down, modernist, model that is flawed, problematic, and often ends poorly for subjects. The goal of local legibility by the state is transparency from the top down, from the top of the tower or the center/seat of the government, so the state can effectively operate upon their subjects.

I can definitely see that happening with excessive reporting in corporate life. Also seems somewhat analogous to the corporate/state mass surveillance topic (à la Snowden).

notjtrig• 3 years ago

At the time the American railroad interests were enslaving tens of thousands of Chinese and perpetuating genocide against the native people and animals, that's technically not co-operation nor was anything involving the English working class and industrial revolution.

I think the word you're looking for is subordination.

RugnirViking• 3 years ago

It was also around this time that pocket watches were becoming more common, and it was generally being understood how widespread the phenomenon of altering clocks to cheat more hours of work out of labourers was. It even happened that people would bribe churches to ring in particular schedules.

So perhaps its no surprise that there was a general mistrust of attempts to control time

hgomersall• 3 years ago

Many people lost their livelihoods with the coming of the railways. It's not entirely surprising they were against anything that came from them.

perilunar4• 3 years ago

Faced with an inevitable outcome, which had clear benefits, with no discernable down-sides [1], the population still managed to find the time, energy and will to fight.

Cui bono? If it doesn't benefit the locals much, why should they change? If it does benefit, then why the need to force the change? Just run the two in parallel and if the benefit is clear enough the old way will die out naturally.

bregma• 3 years ago

And this is why the USA exclusively uses the metric system today.

looping8• 3 years ago

It could also be about the power balance. These small towns probably always had to do adjustments to fit what London wanted, because bigger cities always have priority. It's not surprising that they fought back against orders from the leaders, questioning authority when you have no power is natural.

philihp• 3 years ago

Imagine knowing this, and still using the imperial system

otteromkram• 3 years ago

Some of us don't have to imagine; your dream is our reality.

Plys, the US uses both systems. Imperial is just more practical for everyday use.

See your foot down there near the ground? Tada! You have a built-in measuring tool. How neat is that?

rvba2• 3 years ago

I agree with what you write - that there are lots of people who are stubborn just to be stubborn and lots of people who dont like changing things.

However when we discuss local time and adjusting a local time to the central time, we come to some very different conclusions. For example in Europe, countries from Poland to Spain are in the same timezone. This is very good for business - when you schedule a meeting at 9:00 AM, then it is the same 9:00 AM everywhere (on a side note, never schedule meetings at 9:00, be kind and at least do 9:30). The problems is that what is good for conducting business is not good for regular people, because due to the "one big time zone" a lot of people live in.. a wrong time-zone. This is very clear when you look at Spain, where the sun shines after 22:00 (10:00 PM) - while there is no sun when people are supposed to wake up. At the same time, those in Poland live a miserable life - the sun shines very early, but when you leave work -> there is no more sun (meanwhile Germans have around 1 hour more sun after work, the french 2 hours more sun after work and Spaniards have like 3-4 more hours). Here of course I assumed the 9-5 work (9:00 - 17:00) what is typical for office workers. The rule is that if you live east from the correct time you are screwed by having less sun. This impacts your quality of life. Imagine you spent your whole life losing 2 hours of sun every day.

I swear I saw research somewhere that showed the same is in USA, those on the western part of a timezone are richer than those on the eastern part as well, what removes the historical reasons from war-torn Europe, impact of communism etc.

As far as I know China has one big time-zone for the whole country. I wonder how it works when the official 7AM is 4AM "sun time" in another part.

In theory people could somehow adjust their hours to the local time, but usually they dont. Offices start at 8:00 or 9:00 AM (and at least more and more allows flexible start or work from home), so those that live east have simply less sun exposure - more miserable life. When sun shines - you are more keen to go outside, for a jog, or whatever. When it is dark? You cannot quantify this easily.

Jenda_• 3 years ago

Or the other way around: imagine you are the "owl" type (I'm not sure it is called this way in English; let's say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder) and you are forced to live your entire lifetime in a sleep deprivation.

My life quality went up when I was able to push most lectures at the college from 10:40. In high-school, we were starting at the "standard" 8:00 and sometimes even 7:05.

arrrg• 3 years ago

Precise time keeping, while having obvious advantages, has also been, especially during exactly this time, a tool for squeezing ever more work into day.

So from that perspective not liking precise time keeping (and structuring the day not using the sun but the clock) is very understandable.

globular-toast3• 3 years ago

When I did my deep dive on time (a rite of passage for any serious programmer) it took surprisingly long to realise that having a single clock to which everyone around the world synchronises is something we take for granted but is something that needed inventing. GMT became the standard just because they did it first.

perilunar4• 3 years ago

Not so much first as most: Greenwich was the prime meridian because "Britannia ruled the waves", and Britain made most of the nautical charts.

mikhailfranco2• 3 years ago

There is a feedback loop between accuracy of clocks and accuracy of charts. Measuring longitude requires an accurate clock on a ship, which can keep a reference time to compare with local solar time.

The obvious challenges include motion of the ship and huge ranges of temperature encountered on global voyages.

Britain invented the best maritime clocks by encouraging open competition for a large prize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards

See the book Longitude by Dava Sobel.

You can see John Harrison's chronometers at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich - on the top of a small hill in a park in south-east London. It really is amazing how the original desktop clock monsters were shrunk down to a pocket watch that had better accuracy.

Greenwich was the prime meridian because Britain invented the best clocks.

defrost2• 3 years ago

    The Paris meridian is a meridian line running through the Paris Observatory in Paris, France – now longitude 2°20′14.02500″ East.

    It was a long-standing rival to the Greenwich meridian as the prime meridian of the world.

    The "Paris meridian arc" or "French meridian arc" (French: la Méridienne de France) is the name of the meridian arc measured along the Paris meridian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_meridian

It (the Greenwich meridian) became the standard via weight of maps and naval strength of the British, there are many maps from the early days that don't follow the Greenwich standard, enough so that "wrong longitude because we assumed wrong meridian" is a minor trope in treasure map stories.

jgrahamc• 3 years ago

GMT became the standard just because they did it first.

Sort of. Lots of countries used a local meridian as their 0 degrees reference for longitude. Then in 1884 there as the International Meridian Conference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Confere...) which chose Greenwich as the reference line. The same conference also voted to have midnight be the start of the day for astronomical and nautical purposes (instead of noon).

The French objected to using Greenwich and hung on to the Paris meridian until into the 20th century. But the practicality of lots of maps using Greenwich (because of Britain's naval power) swayed people to have Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.

languagehacker• 3 years ago

If you find this story interesting, give Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants by James Vincent a read. It was absolutely splendid and littered with great tales about how measurements such as this helped broader and broader communities function in concert, while at the same time sacrificing our personal freedom and leisure bit by bit.

Steve44• 3 years ago

Canary Wharf in London has a installation of six Swiss railway clocks which, invisible to most people passing by, has a clever way of synchronising.

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/see-londons-six-swiss-r...

The second hand takes 58.5 seconds to rotate around by 59 seconds, then the second hand pauses. It waits until a nationwide pulse is sent to every Swiss railway clock that a minute has passed, then the clock jumps to the minute and carries on for another 58.5 seconds.

throw0101c2• 3 years ago

If anyone likes the aesthetic of the watch face, you can buy a design for your wrist:

* https://mondaine.com

Apple (potentially) copied (?) the design in 2012 and there was a bit of drama about it and they ended up cutting a cheque:

* https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367216/apple-sbb-mondain...

* https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/time-is-money-apple-...

Railway time

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