The Forgotten International Time Zones

A time before Greenwich Mean Time, when cities had their own minutes and seconds, leading to complete chaos.

Once upon a slightly disorganised time, the world didn’t run like clockwork. Not even close. Long before Greenwich got all high and mighty with its Mean Time, the planet’s relationship with hours, minutes, and seconds was a bit of a mess. A charming mess, to be fair. Picture a world where every town, village, and outpost cheerfully ignored the idea of synchronisation and went with its own version of the time. And why not? The sun rose when it rose, the cows needed milking when they needed milking, and that was quite enough, thank you very much. No need for coordination when you’ve got instinct and the church bell. Calendars were more hopeful than accurate, and people relied more on gossip than on minute hands. In some places, people trusted the baker’s shadow or the way the light hit the village fountain. If your aunt said it was nearly lunchtime, that was good enough for everyone within earshot.

In the 19th century, time was local. Gloriously, ridiculously local. Noon happened when the sun was directly overhead. That meant high noon in Bristol was about ten minutes behind high noon in London. Leeds? Somewhere in between, unless it was cloudy, in which case they just guessed. Edinburgh might as well have been on Mars. Not the end of the world when your most pressing appointment is tea with the vicar or a stroll to the post office. But when trains entered the picture? Absolute carnage. Timetables became puzzles. You needed a slide rule, a weather report, a brass pocket watch, a nervous disposition, and nerves of steel just to get to Birmingham on time. And that’s if you could figure out what “on time” even meant. Stations became hubs not just of travel, but of heated debate. There were arguments in waiting rooms over whether it was still morning or the beginning of the afternoon, and nobody could quite agree who was right.

Railway companies tried to make sense of it all. They started creating their own standard times, which of course were different from each other. So depending on whose train you were catching, it might be 3:17, or 3:23, or possibly 3:11 and a half, depending on how the station master felt about fractions that day. And good luck asking someone in the ticket booth, who might still be running on local parish time, which was based on a grandfather clock last wound during the reign of George III. It was timekeeping by committee, and the committee was drunk, wearing mismatched socks, and arguing about the definition of “early afternoon.” Stationmasters sometimes made announcements based on instinct alone. “Train to Exeter departing shortly” could mean anything from five minutes to a philosophical sense of readiness.

The newspapers tried to help, printing columns of train arrival times with footnotes longer than the article. People would gather at the station just to witness the spectacle of trying to catch a train. Not to board it, mind you—just to see if anyone managed it. Entire pamphlets were printed explaining the time in your city compared to the railway time and the town twenty miles away. No one understood them. Most were used as kindling. Families kept a stack by the hearth, next to the kindling and unread leaflets about chimney sweeping regulations. Local pubs introduced special offers for anyone who could correctly guess the current time in three nearby towns. Few ever claimed the prize.

America, always keen to one-up chaos, took this concept and ran with it like a caffeinated squirrel. By the 1880s, it had over 300 local time zones. Yes, three hundred. A man could miss a train by arriving early. That’s the level of confusion we’re talking about. Shops opened when the shopkeeper felt like it. Banks closed five minutes earlier across the street. Businesses were tearing their hair out, clocks were being adjusted hourly, and everyone was late for everything. Entire cities were running on vibes. No one trusted anyone else’s watch. And pocket watches became less about accuracy and more about personal expression. Some had tiny labels: “Factory Time,” “Railway Time,” “My Uncle Ted’s Best Guess.” In some towns, church bells were the last word. In others, the pub clock was gospel. It all depended on who shouted the loudest. Neighbours compared time like farmers compared livestock. Precision was for the unimaginative.

Eventually, the sheer absurdity of it all became too much, even for the most stubborn of local officials with a fondness for their own idiosyncratic bell towers. In 1884, a bunch of very serious men in waistcoats met in Washington D.C. for the International Meridian Conference. There were charts, heated arguments, and probably more port than was strictly necessary. Greenwich won the lottery and became the Prime Meridian, mostly because the British had already plastered their maps with it, and no one could be bothered to redraw anything. France sulked for decades. Order, of a sort, was imposed. Time zones were born, and the world reluctantly agreed to play by the same rules. Sort of. There were still grumbles. And some places held out just to be difficult. A few rural communities insisted on sticking with their beloved sun dials and the town’s unique brand of seasonal punctuality, which involved shrugging and checking the direction the sheep were facing.

But for a brief, chaotic stretch of history, the world was a temporal patchwork quilt. Minutes were personal, seconds were subjective, and no one could be quite sure when dinner started or whether you were late, early, or somehow both. It was inconvenient, yes, but there’s something slightly poetic about it too. Time belonged to places, not systems. It was human, inconsistent, delightfully local, and a bit bonkers. It smelled faintly of chimney smoke and ink. Grandfathers told stories about the days when they arrived to work before they’d left home. And no one questioned it. Local poets wrote odes to lost minutes. Children played guessing games about which hour their village had reached. It was storytelling by the sundial, community theatre performed on the ticking stage of nonsense.

Now we have atomic clocks that won’t lose a second in a billion years. They’re on satellites, in labs, ticking away with smug perfection. Very impressive. But deep down, don’t you miss the days when Liverpool and Manchester couldn’t agree what time it was, and the best excuse for being late was simply, “Well, according to my village, I’m actually early”? Maybe we’ve gained precision, but lost a bit of the charm. Because once upon a time, time had personality. And it was gloriously unreliable. It wore a crooked hat, whistled out of tune, and never quite bothered to show up the same way twice. We may live in a world of synchronised seconds now, but the memory of beautifully broken hours still lingers, like a half-remembered dream just outside the tick of the clock.