Charles F. Dowd tamed time.
The career educator conceived a plan so audacious it’s hard to believe there was an era when his vision for the world didn’t exist.
Dowd created time zones. He put the rotation of the Earth, the rise of the sun, the movement of the heavens and the genesis of eternity itself on an artificial schedule for the benefit of mankind.
“To regulate the time of this Empire Republic of the World is an undertaking of magnificent proportions,” the Indianapolis Sentinel wrote on Nov. 21, 1883, three days after railroads instituted time zones across North America.
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Time zones today govern the schedule by which most people on the planet work, sleep – and celebrate.
New Year’s Day arrives around the world on Monday, amid exploding champagne bottles and fireworks, based on a carefully coordinated worldwide clock of 24 time zones that grew from Dowd’s vision.
Charles F. Dowd was a seminary administrator in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the 1860s when he conceived of the idea of time zones to help schedule trains rapidly sprawling across the United States. (Public Domain)
Sydney, Australia, celebrates the arrival of 2024 exactly 15 hours before New York City — just as it did in 2023, and just as it will in 2025.
Dowd’s initial idea in 1869 was to bring sanity to train schedules in an era when time was measured in each local community by the apex of the sun: high noon.
“To regulate the time of this Empire Republic of the World is an undertaking of magnificent proportions.”
“This timekeeping method resulted in the creation of more than 300 local time zones across the country — not to mention disparity in local time depending on your location,” Union Pacific railroad writes in its history of time zones.
“While it could be 12:09 p.m. in New York, it could also be 12:17 p.m. in Chicago.”
The result was chaos for scheduling the rail system that spread rapidly across North America after the Civil War, most notably with the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869.
Revelers are shown celebrating New Year’s Eve in Times Square on Jan. 1, 2023, in New York City. (Alexi Rosenfeld/ Getty Images)
Dowd’s plan disrupted the entire history of human timekeeping — turning natural Sun Time into manmade Standard Time.
“The sun is no longer to boss the job,” the Indianapolis Sentinel opined.
“It is a revolt, a rebellion. The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time. The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange.”
Birth of ‘Father Time’
Charles Ferdinand Dowd was born on April 25, 1825, in East Guilford (now Madison), Connecticut.
“He was a teacher by profession and organizer by nature,” according to the Madison Historical Society, as well as “a descendant of the original 1639 Guilford settlers.”
He studied at Yale and spent his life in education.
Temple Grove Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York, now the site of Skidmore College. Seminary founder Charles F. Dowd created time zones. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. (The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs)
Most notably, he and his wife, Harriet, founded Temple Grove Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1868 and ran the school for more than 30 years.
Skidmore College is located on the footprint of the seminary.
“Charles found the time to study the confusing railroad time problem,” writes the Madison Historical Society — adding, “which he solved by creating an elegantly simple zone plan.”
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The rapid advance of railroads highlighted the vastness of the North American continent, while exposing the limitations of Sun Time even between short distances.
The time of the sun’s apex varies by both latitude and longitude. High noon is different in every single community on the planet, even those separated by only a few miles east or west, north or south.
A painting depicting the ceremonial driving in of “the golden spike” at the meeting of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads on May 10, 1869, in Promontory, Utah. (Ed Vebell/Getty Images)
Seven seconds separates Sun Time at the Capitol Dome and Sun Time at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Sun Time at the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago is 67 seconds earlier than it is on the western edge of the city.
The industry created Railroad Time to address the transportation crisis.
“The sun is no longer to boss the job … the sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time.”
“Railroads began setting times for the towns through which they passed, especially out West, because they had to create some kind of order,” Patricia LaBounty, curator of the Union Pacific Collection at the Union Pacific Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, told Fox News Digital.
Time needed new management.
Union Pacific Railroad timetable for Sunday, Nov. 4, 1866. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Dowd’s plan called for four time zones in the continental United States, centered around the 75th (Eastern), 90th (Central), 105th and 120th meridians.
A new standard of time was now on the clock.
‘The Day of Two Noons’
Dowd issued a pamphlet titled “A System of National Time for Railroads” in 1870 and found an influential ally in William F. Allen, a railroad engineer and editor of the “Traveler’s Official Railway Guide.”
The time arrived on Nov. 18, 1883.
Black-and-white illustration of a map of the United States of America show just some of the rail lines crisscrossing the nation. (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
‘Allen was on hand at the Western Union Telegraph System building in New York City to witness the plan’s implementation,” the Madison Historical Society notes.
“Room 148 contained the company’s regulator clock. At 9 a.m., the clock was stopped for precisely three minutes and 58:38 seconds. The clock was then restarted, and Eastern Standard Time was born.”
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Dowd’s plan turned back time in many communities across the nation.
“On the eastern part of each time zone there was a noon based upon sun time,” Carlton J. Corliss wrote in his 1952 time treatise, “The Day of Two Noons.”
“Then clocks and watches were set back from one to 30 minutes to the new Standard Time, so that there was another noon when Standard Time in the community reached 12 o’clock.”
Two conductors compare time with a standard clock at a Union Pacific station in Huntington, Oregon. (Courtesy Union Pacific Railroad Museum)
He added, “If the community used railroad time, the difference in many instances was more than 29 minutes … In eastern Georgia, where Savannah time was used, there was a 44-minute gap between the old and new time.”
But clocking God’s creation alarmed people of the era.
The concept was considered preposterous, greedy, possibly illegal and even sacrilegious.
“An impassioned preacher in Tennessee smashed his own pocket watch at the pulpit, decrying the railroad’s interference with ‘God’s time.’”
“The mayor of Bangor, Maine, threatened jail time for anyone ringing church bells using the new Standard Time hours,” the Madison Historical Society reports.
“An impassioned preacher in Tennessee smashed his own pocket watch at the pulpit, decrying the railroad’s interference with ‘God’s time.’”
Uncle Sam proved to be way behind schedule on time zones, too.
Union Pacific Diesel Locomotive Train, Cajon Pass near Ono, California, 1964. Sprawling distances across North America and a confusing patchwork of local methods of timekeeping encouraged railroads to adopt time zones in 1883. (GHI/Universal History Archive via Getty Images)
“Five days before Standard Time was to go into effect, the Attorney General of the United States issued an edict that government departments had no right to adopt railroad time until authorized to do so by Congress,” wrote Corliss.
American private enterprise — railroads — provided the innovation that literally bent tie to the benefit of mankind.
Unscheduled stop
Charles F. Dowd’s death was untimely.
He was killed beneath the wheels of a railroad locomotive in Saratoga Springs at approximately 5:30 p.m. on Nov. 12, 1904.
A print from a supplement to the Le Petit Journal in France, Nov. 14, 1891. Charles F. Dowd, the creator of time zones, died similarly in 1904, when struck and thrown by a train. (Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)
“Dowd accidentally walked into the moving D & H train,” local historian Janice Pruchnicki wrote for Connecticut Insider in 2017.
“He was struck and thrown 30 feet, dying instantly.”
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Dowd was 79 years old.
More than a dozen nations agreed to adopt uniform time zones, built around Dowd’s model, as early as 1884.
Midnight fireworks seen over the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia during New Year’s Eve celebration, Jan. 1, 2023. (Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Mankind had divided the day into 24 hours from the time of Ancient Greece.
The world was similarly divided into 24 time zones as the concept expanded around the world.
Uncle Sam got on board the time zone train on March 19, 1918, amid World War I, with the passage of the Standard Time Act.
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With an estimated 100,000 Americans alive today over the age of 100, tens of thousands of U.S. citizens still alive now were born into a world without uniform time.
The audacity of time zones is almost hard to comprehend.
Charles F. Dowd conceived of time zones in 1869. Time zones now regulate much of human life, including New Year’s celebrations around the world. (Public Domain; Alexi Rosenfeld/ Getty Images)
Our ancestors harnessed Mother Nature when they saddled untamed grassland stallions to plow fields and pull cargo, or domesticated wolves to serve as hunting companions and pets for the benefit of mankind.
Dowd corralled celestial forces for the benefit of all people.
Said LaBounty of the Union Pacific Railroad Museum, “Creating a country, and then a world, in which everyone agreed on the time made all our lives easier.”
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