A Brill Calendar: November 23

Standardizing Time

Few one-liners prove the importance of technology more trenchantly than these five words, with their almost biblical ring: ‘And the wheel begat the road’.

It is one of the many memorable sayings of Lewis Mumford, a 20th century American ‘uomo universale’ if there ever was one; (and there used to be many). However, transportation technology has presented its potential to change day-to-day reality since the dawn of civilization, time-keeping included.

It is seldom taken into account in an age priding itself in globalization, in acting locally whilst thinking globally, that the 24 standard time zones - the zigzag line of the International Date Line above the mid-Pacific Ocean included – a literally all-encompassing convention adhered to and followed by each and every nation in an almost soul-stirring unanimity; came into being by steam traction and locomotives pulling trains with dazzling speed across the vast distances of the North-American subcontinent.

Canadian and United States railway authorities adopted the notion and implemented it as from November 23 1883; on a Day of the Lord, a Sunday, featuring much less traffic than during the six days earmarked for toil & sweat in the Book of Genesis.

Without the brilliant, yet elementary proposal - imagined by an American school principal Charles Dowd - to separate and cut the analogue diurnal circle around the planet into twenty-four digital uniform segments the world in Anno Domini MMVIII would come to a grinding halt and total confusion; if not on the brink of annihilation. This procedure was internationally recognized less than one year later – albeit with the Greenwich meridian yet to be placed in its ‘most favoured’ classification...

Among the many blessings bestowed on mankind that hail from Northern America, time-management – in a surprising variety of guises, from mechanized slaughter-houses to assembly-lines – this is not the least.