Eastern Standard Time

Say "Meet me at the clock" and everyone will find you at the famous four-faced opalescent glass timepiece atop the information booth in Grand Central Terminal. It's more famous than its sister clock in an archway in the Graybar Passage heading toward the Main Concourse, but the three words painted beneath make this otherwise undistinguished clock even more historic: “Eastern Standard Time.” That the words are wrong almost eight months a year, during Daylight Saving Time, is irrelevant. They celebrate a phenomenon that began at Grand Central on a Sunday morning in 1883 and spread to every corner of the country--a uniformity imposed not by government but by frustrated timekeepers for most of the railroads that controlled nearly a hundred thousand miles of track across the continent.

Before Standard Time, noon was whenever--and wherever-the sun was farthest from the horizon, which meant when it was 12:12 in New York, it was 12:24 in Boston, 12:07 in Philadelphia, and 11:17 in Chicago. The conflicts were intolerable, especially the crashes and missed connections blamed on unsynchronized minute hands. Solutions had been proposed for decades. The railroads finally embraced four time zones 15 degrees wide (the sun moves longitudinally 15 degrees an hour), as advocated by the Reverend Charles F. Dowd, co-principal of the ladies' seminary in Saratoga Springs that would become Skidmore College.

The shift occurred first in New York, at Grand Central, on Sunday, November 18, which became known as the Day of Two Noons. Tampering with time alarmed some New Yorkers with what would have been Y2K trepidation, but most cheerfully anticipated the shift that advanced midday to 3 minutes, 58 seconds, and 38 hundredths of a second earlier than it had been the day before. In room 48 of the Western Union Building at 195 Broadway, James Hamblet signaled the new noon by dropping the official 42-inch-wide, 125-pound cooper ball from a 22-foot-high staff poised on the roof for navigators and jewelers to see. (To accommodate the New York Central's Sunday-morning schedule, Hamblet had actually stopped the pendulum of his official regulator clock first at 9:00 A.M.)

"There was no convulsion of nature," the New-York Tribune dryly noted, "and no signs have been discovered of political or social revolution." Time marched on after a brief halt, and all was right with the world, or at least with the railroads. Five years after Grand Central opened in 1913, Congress imposed Daylight Saving Time and standardized the time zones during World War I. Reverend Dowd lived to see his proposal adopted by the railroads but not by the government. In 1904 he was struck by a train at a grade crossing in upstate New York. No record survives of whether the train was on time.

TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS