Made In America - Bill Bryson [43]
The War of 1812 also saw the rise of another American icon: Uncle Sam. He appears to have arisen in 1813 in Troy, New York, but little more than that is known.1 Previously America had been personified by a character of obscure origins called Brother Jonathan, who usually appeared in apposition to the English John Bull. The inspiration for Uncle Sam is sometimes traced to one Samuel Wilson, an army inspector of Troy, but it seems more probable that the name was merely inspired by the initials US. The top-hatted, striped-trousered figure that we associate with the name came much later. It was popularized in the 1860s in the cartoons of Thomas Nast, and later reinforced by the famous I WANT YOU recruiting posters of the artist James Montgomery Flagg, in which Uncle Sam lost his genial sparkle and took on a severe, almost demonic look, which he has generally kept to this day.
Thus by the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century America had a national anthem (though it would not be officially recognized as such until 1931), a more or less fixed flag and a national symbol in the form of Uncle Sam. It was, in short, beginning to accumulate the rudiments of a national identity.
But in other ways America remained a collection of disparate parts, each following its own course. This was most arrestingly seen in the absence of uniform times. Until as late as 1883, there were no fixed times in America. When it was midnight in New York, it was 11.47 in Washington, and 11.55 in Philadelphia. In 1869, when Leland Stanford struck the golden spike that marked the completion of America’s first transcontinental railway (in fact he couldn’t manage to drive the spike in; the work had to be completed by someone more adept with a manual implement), the news was instantly telegraphed to a breathlessly waiting nation. In Promontory, Utah, the great event happened at 12.45, but in nearby Virginia City it was deemed to be 12.30. In San Francisco it was 11.46 or 11.44, depending on which authority you believed in, and in Pittsburgh the information was simultaneously received at six places and logged in at six different official times.
In an age when most information arrived by horseback, a few minutes here and there hardly mattered. But as the world became more technologically sophisticated, the problem of variable timekeeping did begin to matter. It was a particular headache for the railways and those who travelled on them. In an effort to arrive at some measure of conformity, most railway companies synchronized the clocks along their own lines, but often these bore no relationship to the times used either locally or by competing railways. Stations would often have a multiplicity of clocks – one showing the station time, another the local time and the rest showing the times on each of the lines serving that station. Passengers unfamiliar with local discrepancies would often arrive to catch a train only to find that it had recently departed. Making connections in a place like Chicago, where fifteen lines met, required the careful study of fat books of algorithms showing all the possible permutations.
Clearly something needed to be done. The first person to push for uniform time throughout the country was the rather unlikely figure of Charles F. Dowd, head of the Temple Grove Ladies’ Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1869, the year of Leland Stanford and the golden spike, Dowd began agitating for the adoption of four time zones very much along the lines of those used today. The idea met with surprisingly heated objections. Many thought it somehow ungodly to tinker with something as elemental as time, ignoring the consideration that clocks are not a divine concept. Some communities saw it as an impudence to expect them to change their clocks for the benefit of commercial interests like