Still Monkeying With Father Time

Sunday Morning Observer, November 24, 1918

Marietta time ordered pushed ahead an hour on anniversary of standard time.

New boundaries moving time zones were announced in Washington last week by the Interstate Commerce Commission. They become effective at 2 A.M., January 1. Previously they had been fixed by cross country railroads or local laws.

The announcement came on the anniversary of the adoption of Standard Time eighteen years ago, for it was on November 18, 1883, that Standard Time was born in the United States. Since then he has been adopted and given a permanent home in nearly all the civilized countries of the earth.

Before the birth of Standard Time, travelers from Boston and Washington needed to change their watches five times in order to keep up to date. There were over half a hundred standards used in the United States and Canada between the Atlantic and Pacific. Even in the same town there were often two different standards, one known as "sun" or "local" time, and the other as "railroad" time.

Many persons of scientific attainment invented schemes for standardizing time, but the plan finally adopted was worked out by W. F. Allen, secretary of the American Railway Association. At noon on November 18, 1883, there was a universal resetting of clocks in all parts of the United States and Canada, and the four great time zones into which the North American Continent is divided came into existence. European nations, which had suffered as much as America from hap-hazard methods of reckoning time, soon adopted a similar system. The observatory at Washington now distributes standard time with errors of only one-thousandth part of a second.

Here at Marietta the division line between Eastern time and Central time has been the Ohio River. But the new line fixed by the Commission to separate the Eastern and Central time zone begins at the Great Lakes and follows the boundary of Michigan down through Toledo, Mansfield, Columbus and Gallipolis, Ohio; Burlington, Kenova and Williamson, West Virginia; Dungannon, Va.; Bristol, Va.-Tenn.; Telford, Tenn.; Asheville and Franklin, North Carolina; Atlanta, McDonough, Macon, Perry, Americus, Albany and Thomasville, Ga., the north boundary of Florida to River Junction and the Apalachicola River to the Gulf of Mexico.

On the statute books of Ohio there is a law fixing Central time as the official time. For the past few years there has been some agitation in different parts of the state to change the official time to Eastern time. Much of the agitation came from Cleveland, the home of Secretary of War Baker. And in this connection it might be mentioned that Cleveland gets everything she wants now-a-days - from Washington.

Between Central and Mountain time, the line begins at the Canadian boundary at Portal, North Dakota; follows the Missouri River and extends through San Angelo, Texas, and the 109th meridian to the Rio Grande River.

Between Mountain and Pacific time zones, the line goes through the Continental Divide to Helena, Butte and Dillon, Montana. It runs along the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, through Seligman and Parker, Arizona, and along the Colorado River to the Mexican boundary.

All of Alaska is left within a single time zone.