![]() Webb Ball was hired by the railroad and given the title of Chief Time Inspector and awarded himself a contract to produce the first watches specifically designed and approved for railway personnel use. Engineers were required to submit their railroad-approved watches for inspection and testing at regular intervals, after which they would be returned with a certification of their performance. Watches that met its requirements became known as railroad-approved. “Be open faced, size 18 or 16, have a minimum of 17 jewels, adjusted to at least 5 positions, keep time accurately to within a gain or loss of only 30 seconds a week, adjusted to temperatures of 34 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, have a double roller, steel escape wheel, lever set, micrometric regulator, winding stem at 12 o’clock, grade on back plate, use plain Arabic numbers printed bold and black on a white dial, and have bold black hands.” These were codified in 1893 as the General Railroad Timepiece Standards. Ball, a Cleveland jeweler and watch seller, to inspect and improve their railway’s timekeeping equipment.īall reported an appalling lack of quality and maintenance amongst these mission-crucial instruments and developed a standard that came to be adopted widely amongst other rail companies as well. The Lakeshore and Michigan Southern Railway used this opportunity to hire one Webster C. An official report was ambiguous as to the exact cause of the crash whether a stopped watch had given a false impression of the time, or an engineer had simply ignored regulations was never clearly established. The crash killed all 8 workers on board both trains. Clocks and pocket watches were not always supplied by the railroads, and each conductor or engineer used whatever they could afford for themselves, or what was available.Ī tragic crash between an extra fast mail train and a slower freight occurred in 1891 near Kipton, Ohio. The problem was the lack of standardization, and therefore reliability, in the clocks and timepieces used by railroad workers. The creation of time zones and use of them was a big step for railroad expansion, crucial to the growth of the United States itself, but a new problem began to manifest itself, often in grisly form. Image Courtesy Boston Rare Maps Being On The Ball In time the public came to adopt these time zones for their own use, and we use them to this day. All clocks within each zone were to be synced with each other. In 1883 railroad companies decided, for their own operation, to divide the nation into four time zones, Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific. Trains had to be completely reliable in their stopping and starting times. Accurate timing became a matter of life and death- conflicting use of a single railroad track is a fatal error. It became rapidly apparent that this was insufficiently accurate for railroad scheduling. The sun was traditionally the standard by which schedules, and timing devices were set, with each town or settlement observing time on its own. With this newfound speed, the east-west orientation of American expansion produced a new problem: a difference in the rising and setting times of the sun. Suddenly enormous quantities of goods or vast crowds of people could be moved hundreds of miles within a single day. The lightning-like promulgation of the American rail system had a vertiginous effect on the way time and space were experienced in everyday life. Within some fifty years of their initial commercial success in the early 1800s, passenger trains in the United States regularly ran at speeds exceeding 50mph- blindingly fast for a civilization used to traveling by foot or carriage. While chariots, and later wagons and carriages would have doubtless impressed our footbound ancestors, they would not have found them alienating.Įverything changed with the great leap forward that was the invention and widespread adoption of railways and trains. The invention of the wheel increased the capacity for larger-scale speedy travel and brought incremental change to our relationship with time and space. For primitive mankind extreme speed was defined by the fastest runners, then perhaps by those with the speediest horses. For thousands of years, the pace of human life remained a relative constant.
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