British railway companies practically invented the concept of standardized time zones in the 1840s because towns keeping their own local solar time caused catastrophic scheduling nightmares and horrific train collisions.

A closer look

British railway companies practically invented the concept of standardized time zones in the 1840s because towns keeping their own local solar time caused catastrophic scheduling nightmares and horrific train collisions. Before the implementation of Railway Time, noon in London was slightly different from noon in Bristol, making accurate timetables physically impossible to maintain across the expanding rail network. By forcing every station to synchronize their clocks to Greenwich Mean Time, the railways literally reorganized human perception of the day. This means that every single time you are running late for a miserable morning meeting and cursing your alarm clock, you can directly blame a cabal of nineteenth-century train executives who decided that avoiding fiery derailments was slightly more important than letting villagers tell time by looking at the sun