[1] Before the middle of the nineteenth century, towns kept their own local time, each setting its clocks by the moment the sun stood highest overhead, so that noon in one place might fall several minutes before or after noon in another. [2] This patchwork posed no practical difficulty as long as travel and communication remained slow. [3] The spread of the railway changed the calculation. [4] A timetable drawn from dozens of incompatible local times was an invitation to confusion, and it was the railway companies, not governments, that took the lead in imposing a single standard along their lines. [5] In Britain the major companies had largely adopted a uniform “railway time” by the 1840s, decades before Parliament gave it legal sanction. [6] The episode is often cited as an instance of a technology quietly reorganizing a fundamental category of daily life, though it is worth noting that the impetus came less from the machine itself than from the commercial logic of those who operated it.
