The conquest of Time
Here’s an article from The Atlantic on the standardization of time by American railroad companies in 1883. Prior to November 18, 1883, local noon had been set as it had been for millennia — when the sun was at its zenith. Oakland’s noon differed from San Francisco’s by thirty seconds, and in the 1850s there were hundreds of local time zones across the country.
This lead to serious problems for anything that needed to coordinate actions across many times zones, such as the railroads. The various railroad companies kept their own times, and coordinating arrivals, much less keeping tracks free of colliding trains, required the use of time zone tables and algebra.
So, the railroad barons met and decided to coordinate using Greenwich Standard Time, with time zones well defined by longitude. Naturally, there was resistance, with some localities not switching to standard time for up to a year later. People feared to power of the railroads to standardize and industrialize what had previously been defined by nature.
The article doesn’t delve into the matter — it’s a short commentary on a larger book on the American transition from natural time to mechanical time — but it should raise questions and parallels on this post-industrial age. How should standards set? At what point does it become necessary to set standards? Globally, we have not standardized the electrical plug, but does it matter?
The electrical plug may not be a good example, actually: it’s software embodied as hardware, not pure information itself, like standard time is. In terms of pure information, we have such things as the Internet Protocol. It was easier to change time in 1883 — fewer dependencies — than it is today. Again, consider IP, but this time IPv6: our information rich society has dependencies now, where pure information gets embodied in other information, which may need to change also.