Telling Time

The question of time may not be as interesting as sex to most people, but to the historian, who studies change over time, it is central. A curious sidelight of daily life is the standardization of time. The Civil War gave a great impetus to standardization—of such things as shoe sizes and rail­road gauges—and a rough standardization of clocks was achieved. But railroads needed precision if collisions were to be avoided, and New Haven was the home city of a major railroad and a major university. Thus some of the earliest efforts at standardization occurred there. Sidney Withington, an electrical engineer for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, pointed out that as late as 1881, New York, Boston, Hartford, New Haven, and New London all operated on different stan­dard times: “Marking Time in 1883: A Contribution Made by the Rail­roads to Our National Welfare in Standardizing Time Throughout the Country,” in Annual Report of the Connecticut Society of Civil Engineers, (1951): 120-33, a piece condensed as “Standardization of Time in Con­necticut,” Railway and Locomotive Historical Bulletin. 46(April, 1938).

Not everyone had a watch, and most nineteenth-century Connecticuters probably resented the tyranny of the clock, anyway. Nevertheless, though very few had owned timepieces in 1780, many more did in 1820, most of them wealthy, says Lee Soltow in “Watches and Clocks in Connec­ticut: A Symbol of Socioeconomic Status,” CHS Bulletin 45(0ctober, 1980)4:115-22. Soltow got his information by analyzing tax returns from Franklin, Hebron, Wolcott, and Hartford.