It All Began with Railway Time

Each year, as many countries around the globe enter or leave Summer Time (Britain), Daylight Saving Time (North America), or Sommerzeit (Germany), people ask why? And why can’t the US and the EU agree on the same Summer Time schedule? Each year there is a one or two-week period when Daylight Saving Time in the US does not align with Summer Time in Europe. How did we get here?

Something we take very much for granted, time zones and clocks using a standard time system, had to be invented – and imposed on people who needed convincing. Today people complain about the inconvenience of switching to or from Daylight Saving Time. But they would complain a lot more if there were no Standard Time to begin with. The United States didn’t even have time zones until November 1883, when several North American railways created four “Time Belts” – what we now call the Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern time zones.

The World Time Clock (Weltzeituhr) in Berlin rotates to show the time in all 24 zones. Although we take time zones for granted, they are a recent invention. The first time zones were created by railroads in Europe and North America in the 1880s. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

One of the first people to advocate for time standardization was the American amateur astronomer William Lambert. Already in 1809, long before the advent of even the earliest railways in the US in the 1830s, Lambert presented to Congress his recommendation for the establishment of time meridians. His proposal was ignored, as was Charles Dowd’s similar idea in 1870. Dowd revised his proposal in 1872, but even then, Congress failed to act, and it would be left to the ever-expanding railroad companies to adopt and regulate their own system of time zones.

Britain Was First
In the history of the world, official, standard, nationwide time is a very recent phenomenon. The first nation to pass a law establishing standard time (“civil time”) throughout its land did so on 2 August 1880. That was Britain, which legalized a time convention, also created by railroads, that had been around since 1847. The railroads agreed to use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) for what became known as “Railway Time.” In Britain, Germany, and North America it was the railroads and their need to coordinate schedules that led to time zones and standardized time. Before that, local time was determined by each locality based on “solar time.” But the growth of rail travel showed that the existing time chaos was simply not practical. It was no way to run a railroad.

Standard Time Belts: A colorized version of a 1913 map showing “Railway Time” zones or belts named Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern. Eastern Canada’s Atlantic time zone was created later. The United States did not have official time zones until 1918! PHOTO: OwenBlacker (Wikimedia Commons; Daily News Almanac and Yearbook, 1913

In the much larger USA and Canada, with rail lines spanning thousands of miles, a single time zone wasn’t practical. In the beginning, each railway used its own time standard, and there were no official time zones. On 11 October 1883, a Chicago convention of US and Canadian railroad executives agreed to set their clocks using a new five-zone system based on a telegraph signal from the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh at exactly noon on the 90th meridian. In the end, the new railway system only had four time zones, and those did not have quite the same boundaries as the current US time zones. Only a year later, in 1884, the International Prime Meridian Conference took place in the US and basically set up the world’s 24 time zones. But, as we’ll see below, the United States took a very long time to formally adopt the principles set up by the international conference held on its own soil.

The “Last Spike” ceremony: Sandford Fleming (in tallest hat) at the 1885 ceremony for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Donald Alexander Smith is the one with the hammer, driving the last spike. PHOTO: Ross, Alexander, Best & Co., Winnipeg (Library and Archives Canada – Wikimedia Commons)

At a national level in the US, standard time was not enacted into law until the 1918 Standard Time Act established standard time zones. The 1918 law also instituted daylight saving time (DST), but it proved unpopular, particularly in agricultural regions. Daylight saving time was repealed in 1919 over a presidential veto. DST was not reestablished nationally until World War II.

Austria, Prussia, and the Central European Time (CET) Zone
In German-speaking Europe, where time and punctuality are major concerns, things moved a bit faster. The first to adopt Central European Time (CET) was the Austro-Hungarian Empire (minus Vienna) on 1 October 1891. (Serbia was the first European nation to do so, seven years earlier in 1884.) Almost a decade after the 1884 International Meridian Conference, on 1 April 1893, the German Empire officially unified its time zone under CET (Mitteleuropäische Zeit, MEZ). Vienna, Austria also did so belatedly at that time. A year later, Switzerland and Liechtenstein introduced CET as well. (The USA took 35 years, more than three times longer, to make standard time zones legally binding!)

The Central European Time zone (UTC+one hour) is centered on the 15th meridian to the east of the prime meridian. (In 1972, GMT was replaced by Coordinated Universal Time [UTC], maintained by atomic clocks around the world, and serving as the basis for the worldwide GPS navigation system.) The 15th meridian passes through Görlitz, Germany, just across the Polish border from Zgorzelec on the Lusatian Neisse River (Lausitzer Neiße). In fact, when the new time zone was introduced in 1893, Germans referred to it as Görlitzer Zeit, or Görlitz Time.

Görlitzer Zeit: This 1893 map shows how the Central European Time zone is based on the 15th meridian, almost perfectly centered on Germany and Austria-Hungary. PHOTO: J.H. Graf: Die Einführung der MEZ in der Schweiz, Bern 1894

Before that, telling time in Germany was as chaotic as in North America. The solar, local time in Berlin was not the same as in Munich, albeit with Berlin time only seven minutes ahead of Munich. As elsewhere, the advent of the railroad forced Germans to rethink this patchwork of local times. Although the 1884 Washington conference had established 24 time zones around the world, timekeeping for the average European or North American had not changed much, if at all. By the 1850s in Europe, the railroads had developed a somewhat haphazard time system that was based on national capitals and astronomical observatories, and depended on coordination using a new invention called the telegraph. But Bern, Berlin, Paris, Prague, Geneva, and other European capitals each still had their own local time. Railway stations where trains arrived from various capitals remained unable to coordinate rail schedules in any uniform way. A station such as Geneva (Geneva time), where trains arrived from France (Paris time) and Switzerland (Bern time) had great difficulty dealing with conflicting national time zones. Since the railroads in Europe were national companies, “railway time” was of little help. But as of 1893, Germany and Central Europe had an official time zone that was one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.

Daylight Saving Time • (Sommerzeit) Summer Time

Various people, Benjamin Franklin among them (in 1784), are credited with the idea of Daylight Saving Time. But it was 1908 before that idea was actually put into practice – by a Canadian city. Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada, was the first city in the world to enact DST, on 1 July 1908. Although that was followed a few years later by Orillia, Ontario, Canada would have to wait some time before DST was observed nationwide.

On a national level it was the German Empire (Deutsches Kaiserreich), along with Austria-Hungary, that first put the concept of adding daylight hours to each day into practice. For three years, beginning on 30 April 1916, as part of the war effort, the clocks were set an hour ahead, from the end of March until the end of September. This time alteration was known as Sommerzeit (“Summer Time”). But in 1919, with the dawn of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first experiment with daylight saving time came to an end.

Standard time continued in the early years of the Third Reich, but with the outbreak of World War II, Sommerzeit was reintroduced as part of the war effort. From 1940 through 1942 permanent daylight saving time was the legal time in Germany. For the rest of the war, alternating Sommerzeit and standard time returned. When the war ended in 1945, there was a period of time in occupied Germany when time was literally split asunder. In the West the Allies observed Daylight Saving Time in the three Allied zones, that is, CET plus an hour. In the Soviet Zone, however, the clocks reflected Moscow time. There was a two-hour difference between clocks in the three western zones and those in the eastern Soviet Zone.

Between 1947 and 1949 in Berlin and the Soviet Zone there was a so-called Hochsommerzeit that set the clocks two hours ahead (“double summer time”) from 11 May until 29 June. This was justified by the need to have more daylight in a devastated war zone with damaged infrastructure. But from 1950 to 1979 the clocks in divided Germany remained on standard Central European Time. For political and economic reasons, both East and West Germany went along with the rest of Europe and reintroduced Summer Time in 1980.

Beginning in 1996, a standardized daylight time was introduced throughout the European Union and reunified Germany. As of 2011, all member states of the European Union set their clocks an hour ahead from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. Germany and other nations within the CET area switch to Central European Summer Time (CEST, UTC+02:00) during the spring and summer. The EU has three time zones: Western European Time (GMT; Ireland, Portugal), Central European Time (17 Member States, including Germany) and Eastern European Time (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania).

The European Parliament Vote on Summer Time
Following a survey that showed 84 percent of the 4.6 million Europeans polled were in favor of dumping the time change, the European Parliament voted in March 2019 to end the biannual time switch in 2021. (The Council of the European Union and the European Parliament will have to come to an agreement before the proposal can take legal effect.) But the Covid pandemic and Brexit delayed that plan, and the European Union is now in a state of limbo concerning daylight time. Perhaps the recent action by the US Senate (see below) will spur some EU action, but that is uncertain. And the EU nations are also unsure about whether to adopt permanent daylight saving time or permanent standard time. Germany seems to favor permanent summer time, while others favor standard time or even a continuation of switching between the two! In any case, coordinating time among the EU’s 27 nations and its three time zones will not be easy. A good example is the United Kingdom, no longer an EU member, but a neighbor of Ireland, which is in the EU. The UK no longer has to follow EU guidelines, in this case the ones that called for neighboring countries to coordinate which time system they will use.

Daylight Saving Time in the USA
As mentioned above, the first nationwide implementation of daylight saving time occurred in the German Empire and Austria-Hungary in 1916 during World War I. Once the United States became involved in the Great War, in April 1917, it also adopted DST. The measure was unpopular, especially in farming regions. Farmers had less daylight in the mornings, when they needed to get work done. Congress abolished DST after the war, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, but daylight time remained a local option. Some large cities such as New York adopted DST, but it would not be observed on a national level until the Second World War.

On 9 February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted year-round DST. What was known as “War Time” lasted until 30 September 1945. From October 1945 to 1966, although there was no federal law regulating daylight time, many states and cities east of the Mississippi River adopted DST, but there was no uniformity in the dates. As of 1954, California and Nevada were the only states with statewide DST west of the Mississippi, and only a few cities between Nevada and St. Louis had daylight time. Added to that, portions of North Dakota and Texas observed a sort of “reverse” daylight saving time, setting their clocks back an hour rather than moving them forward. In other words, the time situation in the USA was becoming chaotic.

The transportation industry found the lack of standards and consistency reason enough to start pushing for federal regulation in 1962. Four years later, the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which took effect in 1967, mandated standard time within the established time zones and provided for advanced time with specific conditions regarding dates and times. States were allowed to exempt themselves from DST as long as the entire state did so. (In 1967, Arizona and Michigan were the first to reject DST, although Michigan began observing DST in 1972.) In 1972, the act was amended to allow states in two time zones to exempt either the entire state or that part of the state lying within a different time zone.

The world’s 24 time zones sometimes vary from solar mean time for political and economic reasons. Notice the international prime meridian (UTC, Greenwich meridian, IERS Reference Meridian) in the middle and the International Date Line on the right, both in red. PHOTO: NASA (Wikimedia Commons)

Following the 1973 oil embargo by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), the US experimented with year-round DST as part of an effort to conserve fuel. The trial period ran from 6 January 1974 until 27 April 1975. A heated debate about the effectiveness and daily life ramifications of the experiment ensued. In the end, the benefits were deemed minimal, and the country returned to summer DST only.

In 1986 Congress amended the Uniform Time Act by changing the beginning of DST to the first Sunday in April and having the end remain the last Sunday in October. These start and end dates were in effect from 1987 to 2006. The time of the clock adjustment moved to 2:00 a.m. local time. The last change was the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which extended DST in the United States beginning in 2007. The law extended DST to make it last four or five weeks longer than previously, and that is the current situation in the USA.

Since the 2010s, there has been a growing movement in the US and Europe calling for the elimination of summer DST and introducing either year-round DST or observing full-time standard time. As we shall see below, there are several reasons why that has not happened in Europe or the US as of March 2022.

North America and Europe: The Daylight Saving Time (DST) Gap
The current DST schedules in the European Union (since 2011) and the USA/Canada (since 2007) do not agree – neither for when they start nor end. The EU begins Summer Time on the LAST Sunday in March. North America begins DST on the SECOND Sunday in March. The end of Summer Time in Europe is the LAST Sunday in October, while DST in the USA and Canada ends on the FIRST Sunday in November. (Most of Mexico switches annually to daylight time on the US schedule.)

In 2022 this meant that DST in the USA began on 13 March and ended on 6 November. In the European Union, Summer Time began on 27 March (two weeks later than in North America) and ended on 30 October (one week later than in North America).

In recent times, both the EU and the USA (and Canada) have proposed ending DST/Summer Time. No definite steps have been taken to date however, and there is a BIG problem with ending the annual time shifts: what will take its place? Will a country, region, or state/province adopt year-round DST or standard time? And this would not be the first time that countries have experimented with all-year Daylight Saving Time. Both Russia and Britain have tried it and later dropped it. Today all of Russia’s eleven time zones remain on standard time 365 days a year.

Summer Time All the Time (or Not)
In 1968 a three-year experiment called British Standard Time began, in which the UK and Ireland experimentally employed British Summer Time (GMT+1) all year round; clocks were put forward in March 1968 and not put back until October 1971. Many countries and organizations today are also in favor of introducing year-round summer time, but they face the same problems that the UK and Ireland confronted: year-round daylight/summer time in the latitudes of most European countries means late sunrises and dark mornings in the winter.

Then there are the places (nations, states, provinces, cities) that never observe daylight time. China, Russia, and India shun it. The US states Arizona and Hawaii have opted out of Daylight Saving Time. (The Navajo Nation in Arizona and New Mexico does observe DST.) The US territories American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands do not observe DST. Two Canadian provinces, Saskatchewan and Yukon, both far to the North, currently have permanent daylight saving time. Around the world, fewer than 40 percent of countries now observe some form of Daylight Saving Time. The closer you get to the equator, the less daylight saving time makes any real difference, which is one reason Hawaii has no DST. Most nations in South America, Asia, and Africa do not observe daylight time.

On 15 March 2022, the United States Senate, with little warning and almost no debate, passed a bill sponsored by Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, titled the Sunshine Protection Act. (The senator had previously unsuccessfully introduced his “Sunshine” bill from 2019 through 2021.) The legislation, if also passed by the House of Representatives and signed by President Biden, called for permanent daylight time to go into effect in November 2023. But nothing happened. Even before that, there were protests from various groups, including Save Standard Time, objecting to year-round daylight time, which they view as unhealthy because it varies from natural solar time. Critics of permanent DST point to special interests (retail, golf, and tourism) that promote a “false clock” that is even more harmful than biannual clock changes.

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Related Pages
AT THE GERMAN WAY

• Germany – Topics related to German culture and life in the Federal Republic of Germany
• History and Culture – Topics related to German-speaking Europe (Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein)
• Travel and Tourism – Travel tips for Austria, Germany, and Switzerland – Know before you go!

ON THE WEB

• Permanent time observation in the United States (Wikipedia) – An overview of the pros and cons of permanent daylight time, with a state-by-state chart of DST legislation

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