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VIIIndustry and Railways

ESEN
Index
ESEN
Index

Chapter VII · Act II — Making Time

Industry and Railways

1830–1900

Machines make machines; time is standardised for the whole world.

Machines begin to make watches, and trains begin to need them. When a single journey crosses dozens of different local times, time has to come to an agreement.

Railway time

Boston · 08:15

Drag to turn it · arrow keys on a keyboard · double-click to face it

Each station’s local mean time from its longitude, and zone time from the nearest standard meridian. A diagram: the line follows no real route.

  1. 1Track
  2. 2Station clocks
  3. 3Standard meridians, 75° and 90° W
  4. 4Train and its run

  1. Before time zones, every town lives by the time of its own meridian: four minutes’ difference for every degree to the west.

  2. A train from Boston to St Louis crosses almost twenty degrees: its timetable is written in one time and read in another.

  3. On 18 November 1883 the railways of the United States and Canada adopt time zones: each clock takes the time of its standard meridian.

  4. Switch to zone time: the clocks of each band agree, and between one band and the next lies exactly one hour.

Machines that make machines

  1. c. 1839

    Leschot’s pantograph

    Vacheron Constantin turns to Georges-Auguste Leschot to make watches by machine. His pantograph drills all the holes of a plate, copying them from a brass template six times its size. It is a step towards interchangeable parts, which in practice come first in the United States.

  2. Keyless

    Patek, in Geneva, patents winding and setting by the crown, which Adrien Philippe had devised in 1842. On 7 December Ferdinand Adolph Lange founds in Glashütte the house that will bear his name, with fifteen apprentices.

  3. Greenwich at every station

    The Railway Clearing House decides that every British station should adopt Greenwich time. From 1852 the telegraph carries it from the observatory, and by 1855 almost every town keeps it. The law does not make it official until 1880.

  4. Philadelphia

    At the Centennial Exhibition, America’s Waltham shows the first automatic screw-making machine and wins the first gold medal for precision. Jacques David, sent by Longines, returns with a 108-page report: Swiss watchmaking has to change.

  5. The Meridian Conference

    In Washington, twenty-six countries choose Greenwich as the prime meridian, by 22 votes to 1; France and Brazil abstain. Contrary to popular belief, the conference does not create time zones.

  6. Kipton, Ohio

    Two trains collide because a railwayman’s watch had stopped for a few minutes. Webb C. Ball, chief time inspector, sets standards for railway watches: at least 17 jewels, lever setting and no more than 30 seconds of error a week.

The Line of Precision

The error a day of each chapter’s clocks, on a logarithmic scale. The line moves on with the story: each chapter draws its own stretch.

This chapter’s precision

Riefler regulator1889
≈ 0.01 s a day
  1. c. 1390 BCE: Clepsydra, ≈ half an hour a day
  2. c. 1386: Foliot tower clock, ≈ 15 min a day
  3. 1656: Huygens’s pendulum, ≈ 15 s a day
  4. c. 1715: Graham’s regulator, a few seconds a week
  5. 1761: Harrison’s H4, 5 s in 81 days
  6. 1889: Riefler regulator, ≈ 0.01 s a day

This chapter’s sources