Made In America - Bill Bryson [44]
Finally in November 1883, after a meeting called the National Railway Time Convention, it was agreed to introduce time zones and synchronize clocks. The date 18 November, dubbed ‘the day of two noons,’ was set for its inception. For two weeks, people everywhere fretted and fussed as if the country were about to be struck by an outsize meteor. Farmers worried that their hens would stop laying or that their cows would go dry. Workers in Chicago, suspecting they were to be compelled to work an extra nine minutes on the big day, threatened to strike. By the dawn of the appointed day, the nation was in a fever of uncertainty. Just before noon people everywhere began silently gathering by town halls and court-houses to watch the clocks change.
Although the time change had no legal authority – it was done solely at the behest of the railways – it was introduced almost everywhere, and almost everywhere the event proved to be disappointingly anticlimactic. Millions watched as the hands on their court-house clocks were summarily advanced or moved back a few notches, then pursed their lips and returned to business as it dawned on them that that was as exciting as it was going to get. Here and there local difficulties cropped up. In Washington, a disagreement between the US Attorney General and the head of the Naval Observatory meant that for several years government clocks in the city showed a different time to all others.3 For the most part, however, America took to uniform timekeeping with barely a flutter and life grew easier because of it.
The fuss over introducing time zones was as nothing compared with the push, half a century later, for summer time, or daylight-saving time as it quickly came to be called. The driving force behind this idea was a businessman named William Willett, who wanted it primarily so that he would have more daylight to play golf in the evenings. Again the outcries were vociferous. The New York Times called it ‘an act of madness’ and others seriously suggested that they might equally change thermometers to make summers appear cooler and winters warmer. As one historian has put it, ‘the idea of altering clocks to suit some human whim made daylight saving seem both unnatural and almost monstrous to its many opponents’.4 Although America briefly instituted daylight saving as a way of conserving energy supplies during World War I, such was the antagonism to the idea in some quarters that it wasn’t until 1966 that America got universal summer time.
Money, too, was a feature of American life that did not become standardized until relatively late in the day. Until the issuing of the first ‘greenbacks’ during the Civil War, the federal government in Washington produced no paper money, but only coins. Paper money was left to banks. As recently as the first half of the nineteenth century banks – and the word is used loosely to describe some of these institutions – were in the happy position of being able to print their own money. Types of bills proliferated wildly. In Zanesville, Ohio, to take one example, no fewer than thirty banks churned out money under such colourful appellations as the Virginia Saline Bank and the Owl Creek Bank. The bills were often of such dubious value that they were referred to as shinplasters.5 Some banks’ money was more respected than others’. The Citizens’ Bank of New Orleans issued a particularly sought-after $10 bill. Because the French word for ten, dix, was inscribed on the back they became known as Dixies. As a descriptive term for the whole of the South,