Image Source: Micapixel on flickr
On August 12, 1853, two trains left Providence, Rhode Island, heading in opposite directions on the same single-track line. One carried hundreds of passengers toward Boston, the other toward Providence. Both were supposed to pull over at a siding to let the other pass. But the schedules, written according to local solar times, didn’t quite align. Each conductor believed he had the right of way.
The trains met head-on in what became known as the Great Railway Crash of 1853. Fourteen people were killed, dozens injured. The accident made headlines across America, and though there were many contributing factors, one stood out: the chaos of keeping dozens of local times in a world that now demanded speed and coordination.
Railroads were collapsing the distances between towns, but the clocks still followed the sun. Noon in Boston was different from noon in Providence. Multiply that across the thousands of towns served by rail, and you had a recipe for disaster.
By the 1880s, the confusion was so extreme that the Chicago Tribune published timetables listing 27 different local times in Michigan alone. A simple journey could take you through half a dozen competing versions of noon. In some cities, station clocks showed multiple dials so travelers could track which “noon” belonged to which railroad.
The problem lingered well into the 20th century. In the United States before 1966, when federal law finally standardized daylight saving, towns and states chose their own rules. On one 35-mile bus route between Ohio and West Virginia, passengers had to adjust to seven different time changes. A simple ride turned into a surreal exercise in clock management.
It’s easy to laugh at these stories now, but they reveal just how recent and artificial our modern sense of time really is. For most of history, time was local, seasonal, and flexible. Church bells or the position of the sun governed life. Factories, railroads, and global trade forced us to tighten the screws. The 1884 International Meridian Conference, which crowned Greenwich as the world’s prime meridian, was less about science than about Britain’s power. And once the world adjusted, the logic of standardized time became inescapable.
Today, that logic rules our lives. The atomic clock, accurate to a billionth of a second, underpins GPS satellites, financial markets, and the internet. If those clocks drifted, your Google Maps would be off by kilometers, Wall Street trades would go haywire, and planes would fall out of sync in the sky.
And yet, for all this precision, we live out of step with our bodies. Our circadian rhythms obey the sun, not Greenwich. Daylight saving shifts leave populations groggy and accident-prone. Shift workers live in permanent social jet lag. Even our leisure is chopped into countdowns, nudges, and fifteen-second reels. Time has never been more exact, but for many of us it has never felt more scarce.
There are signs of resistance. Flexible and hybrid work models, once seen as luxuries, are beginning to acknowledge that not everyone’s best hours fall neatly between 9 and 5. Schools that delay start times for teenagers are finding students healthier and more alert because their timetables align better with adolescent sleep cycles. These may be small corrections, but they suggest ways to live with clocks rather than under them.
So here is a question worth considering: if the last two centuries were about mastering time, what would it mean to reclaim it? Could we find a balance where atomic clocks run our satellites and stock exchanges, but human life runs a little closer to the cycles of light, rest, and community?
After all, if people once had to navigate 27 different versions of noon or seven time changes on a single bus ride, maybe the real mystery isn’t how chaotic time used to be. It’s how willingly we’ve allowed the clock to govern us today.
What we’re reading this week
About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney. A fascinating account of how clocks shaped empires, economies, and belief systems, from medieval towers to the atomic age.
Hope you enjoyed this edition of Plain Sight. If you did, share it with a friend. And as always, write to us with your thoughts at plainsight@wyzr.in. We’ll feature some of the most interesting responses in future editions.
Until next week,
Best,
