Standard Time Proposed: Sandford Fleming Wants to Sync the World
Sandford Fleming missed a train in Ireland because the schedule said "5:35" but didn't specify morning or afternoon. He was a railroad engineer. He knew chaos when he saw it. So in 1879, he proposed dividing the world into 24 time zones, each exactly one hour apart. Before this, every city set its own clocks by the sun. Chicago was 11 minutes behind Detroit. Pittsburgh had six different times depending on which railroad you used. Fleming's system took five years to adopt. Now three billion people coordinate their lives by it daily.
February 8, 1879
147 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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