crumb#011: Time Zones Are a Trainwreck- Literally!
Exploring the Strange Mix of Science, Empire, and Disaster Behind the Clocks We Follow
“East gain add; west lose subtract.”
I don’t think I remember much from school, especially not from my Geography classes- but this phrase, somehow, made its way into the deepest echelons of my memory. I mean, it’s a mnemonic- so that’s kind of its whole purpose. Still, it did quite a good job. And coincidentally, this was taught to us by the same English teacher who once narrated the story about The Sniper.
Now that I think about it, she was actually a Geography teacher, filling in during the English teacher’s absence for a few weeks- you know how schools are. Perhaps I should let her know that there are two full-fledged articles in my oeuvre solely because of her. And there might, in fact, be another loading soon.
The mnemonic helps you navigate time zones. As you know, when you travel around the world, the time changes because of the different time zones.
If you go east (to the right on a map), the time gets later. You need to add hours to your watch.
If you go west (to the left on a map), the time gets earlier. You need to subtract hours from your watch.
That’s fairly straightforward, and that’s not the bone of contention today. The real bone of contention is time zones themselves. Until very recently, I believed that time zones were a gift of science- beautifully and logically distributed (for the most part)- because that’s how they’re always taught, neatly paired with longitudes in geography class. Right? Wrong. The true origin story of standardised time zones isn’t rooted in scientific elegance, but in utter chaos, a train accident, and, of course, our dear old friend: capitalism.
So it’s the 1850s. You're in Boston. It's noon. The sun is directly overhead and you hop on a train to New York. When you arrive, it’s still- noon. Or maybe it’s 12:07. Or 11:56. Or 12:14. Depends on which clock you ask.
Because back then, time wasn’t a global consensus- it was a local opinion.
Every town had its own “mean solar time,” based on when the sun reached its highest point in the sky. That meant noon in one city might be several minutes ahead or behind a city just 100 kilometres away. And no one really cared- until speed became a problem.
For centuries, the world moved slowly enough that the difference didn’t matter. You walked, rode horses, maybe took a boat. To get a good idea of the setting we are in, I highly suggest you play Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. It’s beautiful. And it’s in the exact timeline as this story.
Moving on, in that time, “See you around noon” was good enough. But then came the steam engine. And with it, trains that could travel hundreds of kilometres in a few hours. Suddenly, those harmless little time differences became a logistical migraine.
Railway operators were trying to print timetables in a world where “noon” could mean twelve different things along the same route. Conductors had to juggle time like they were hosting twelve birthdays in twelve cities at once. Chaos was inevitable. And eventually, so was tragedy.
It was August 1853. The industrial age was puffing along confidently on steam and steel. Railroads were the bloodlines of a young, restless America, shuttling people, freight, and ambition across states that were still figuring themselves out. The trains moved fast. Much faster than the existing methods of tracking time could keep up with.
On a summer morning, two trains were scheduled to travel on the same line- one departing from Providence to Worcester, the other heading back from Worcester to Providence. They were meant to pass each other safely, thanks to a timetable that told one train to wait at a siding while the other passed through. In a modern scenario, with synced clocks, this would be a piece of cake.
But here’s the catch: they were each reading from their own clock. And those clocks didn’t agree.
Back then, time was kinda like language- regional, flexible, and proudly local. Providence had its own version of noon. So did Worcester. And while that was harmless when you were tending to sheep or running a local barber shop, it became a problem when two locomotives, each weighing several tons and carrying dozens of passengers, were trusting “noon” to mean the same thing.
Somewhere near a quiet patch of track in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, those two trains collided head-on. The metal screamed. The wood splintered. Fourteen people died. Most of them were children on a school trip. Their lives ended not because someone broke a rule- but because there was no shared interpretation of when the rules applied.
This wasn’t a fluke. It was a system failure. A fatal one at that.
And it shook the railroads. These were not slow-moving horse carts anymore. This was a new world where a five-minute miscalculation could mean tragedy. Time, suddenly, wasn’t philosophical- it was the need of the hour. It needed to be tamed, standardised, brought into order.
And that's when a man in Canada began sketching something radical on the back of an envelope.
His name was Sandford Fleming. A Scottish-born Canadian engineer, the kind of man who looked at problems the way cartographers look at coastlines: not just as obstacles, but as patterns to be drawn, understood, and solved.
By the 1870s, Fleming had already made a name for himself laying railway lines across the vast, wintry sprawl of Canada. But what bothered him most wasn’t the terrain. It was time. Or rather, the maddening inconsistency of it.
He saw it everywhere. Trains in Montreal running on Montreal time, while stations in Toronto insisted on Toronto time, even when both were part of the same railway line. Engineers were forced to carry multiple watches. Conductors carried printed conversion tables like priests carrying scripture. It was absurd. Dangerous. And increasingly, paramount. Just imagine carrying 10 watches, all with times that differed by mere minutes- which could mean the difference between life and death. Clumsy me, would never be able to do that.
So one day, after missing a train due to a schedule mix-up, Fleming snapped- or maybe he did what all good inventors do: he simplified the mess. What if the world ran on one clock? What if we divided the planet into 24 neat slices, each one representing one hour of time, and aligned them to a single prime meridian?
It sounds simple now, but at the time it was revolutionary. Heretical, even.
Fleming’s proposal was clear: a universal day, beginning at midnight at an anchor city, and moving steadily across the globe, hour by hour, zone by zone. Twenty-four time zones. Sixty minutes in each. Everyone synchronised to the sun, but also to each other.
It wasn’t just a mathematical fix- it was a cultural one. A proposal that required kings, captains, merchants, and mayors to agree on something as fundamental as when a day begins.
Fleming pitched it again and again- to railway boards, scientific congresses, government officials. He carried his diagrams like a man carrying prophecy. And eventually, the world listened.
Kind of.
Fleming’s plan was elegant, but it needed an anchor- one line on the globe to mark zero. The Prime Meridian. And that opened up a whole new can of national pride.
Several countries wanted the honour. France pushed hard for Paris. Italy proposed Rome. The Americans flirted with Washington, but in the end, the line went through Greenwich, England.
Why?
Simple. The British had the best and most boats.
By the late 19th century, over two-thirds of the world’s maritime navigation charts used Greenwich as the reference point. British naval power wasn’t just military- it was logistical. Ships sailing across the globe used Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to plot their positions with longitude and celestial observations. If you were sailing from Mumbai to Cape Town or Melbourne, chances were your clock was already set to Greenwich. Colonialism.
So when Fleming and delegates from 25 nations gathered at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, in 1884 to settle the debate, the tide was already heavily in Britain’s favour.
Greenwich won the vote 22 to 1. Only San Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) voted against. France abstained- because of course they did- and continued using the Paris meridian domestically for several more decades, just out of spite. French pride, where have we seen it before.
It wasn’t just about astronomy or geography. Choosing Greenwich was a nod to British influence, the reality of sea trade, and the simple fact that standardising time was easier if half of the world already followed something. This makes me want to write an article on what would the world be like had the British Empire never existed. My school for one.
With that, the foundation was laid. The Prime Meridian was drawn, the time zones plotted, and the modern world took a deep breath and started ticking in sync.
To be clear, the grid itself- the crisscrossing lines of latitude and longitude- wasn’t new. Ancient astronomers had dreamt it up, and by the 18th century, navigators were using it religiously. But those lines had only ever mapped space. What Fleming did was take that familiar grid and map time onto it. Every 15 degrees of longitude? That became one hour. It was the same old globe, but now it had a pulse. Mapping spacetime before Einstein himself.
You’d think that after the 1884 conference, the world would’ve snapped to attention and started ticking in harmony. Not quite.
The agreement was more of a handshake than a law. The time zones were proposed, the Prime Meridian selected, but there was no enforcement mechanism. Countries were left to adopt the system when (and if) they felt like it. Some jumped on board quickly, especially railway companies and shipping networks. Others clung to their local time like a badge of honor.
France, in particular, was hilariously petty about the whole thing. Despite sending delegates to the Meridian Conference, they refused to accept Greenwich as the “centre of time.” For decades, French clocks kept ticking to Paris Mean Time- 9 minutes and 21 seconds ahead of GMT- because why not?
Take India, for instance. Geographically, it stretches from Gujarat to Arunachal Pradesh- nearly 30 degrees of longitude across, which should technically place us in two time zones. But instead of a neat split, we chose to walk the middle path: Indian Standard Time (IST), set at GMT+5:30. A half-hour offset that is, in many ways, a metaphor for modern India- pragmatic, imperfect, and stitched together by compromise if you ask me.
The decision was made post-Independence, in 1947. The new government had a nation to unify: linguistically, culturally, administratively, and it wasn’t just about drawing borders. It was about making time feel national. Having one common clock across the country was symbolic. Unity in diverse timezones.
But unity came at a cost- especially in the far east. In places like Assam and Manipur, the sun rises and sets painfully early. Schoolchildren wake up before dawn; streetlights flicker on while the rest of the country basks in daylight. Farmers in the northeast often ignore IST entirely, following their own “chaibagaan time” (literally, tea garden time), which runs about an hour ahead.
If you think India has a problem, there’s China taking this a step further: an enormous country that should technically span five time zones, but doesn’t. It has one. The whole nation runs on Beijing time, even if you're 4,000 kilometres away in Xinjiang, where the sun might rise at 10 a.m. That’s not a bug- it’s a political feature, part of a broader effort to consolidate Communist control and reinforce national unity under the leadership of Mao Zedong.
But if standardised time was born out of train crashes, Daylight Saving Time was born out of war and coal.
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The idea sounds absurd on paper, and in my head- move the clock forward in summer so people have more daylight in the evenings. But in 1916, as World War I dragged on and nations bled both money and resources, Germany decided to try it. The logic? If people had more daylight after work, they’d use less electricity- meaning less coal burned, more saved for the war effort. That’s just a very clever way of saying sleep and get up an hour early.
Britain and its allies, not to be outdone by German efficiency, reluctantly followed suit. Clocks were pushed forward by one hour during the summer months. It was awkward, confusing, and hated by farmers- but effective enough to stick.
By the time World War II rolled around, DST returned with even more enthusiasm. In the US, it was dubbed “War Time,” and everyone just rolled with it. Once again, the motive was fuel conservation. But the side effect was psychological: people began to think differently about time, about the hours of light and dark. The clock was no longer just a neutral observer- it had become a tool, a lever governments could pull. Read about the role of a particular watch in WWII here.
After the wars ended, some countries dropped DST, others kept it, and a few kept reinventing it year after year like a bad reboot. Today, it’s a mess:
The US observes DST- except Arizona (not so United States after all).
Europe does too, but debates scrapping it every few years.
India? We have bigger problems.
Russia tried it, hated it, and gave up.
What started as wartime economising became a global quirk- half science, half politics, and fully annoying for anyone trying to schedule a Zoom call across time zones in March or October. Ask my friends in JPMC attending meets at 2 in the morning. Things you do for capitalism.
So here we are. A planet spinning at 1,600 km/h, divided by imaginary lines and stitched together by something as fragile- and as powerful- as a shared understanding of time.
It’s weird, isn’t it? Time, which we treat as absolute, is actually one of the most human things ever invented. Arbitrary. Political. Negotiated. Prone to errors, edits, and ego.
Even in our friend circles- there’s some who are punctual to a tee, and treat time as sacrosanct. Others couldn’t budge their bottoms even if their lives depended on it- I know a few from both the categories, and trust me, the second type is lucky they don’t get beaten up. I lie somewhere in the spectrum- closer to the former.
Sometimes, I think about that teacher from school- the one who taught me “East gain add, West lose subtract.” I doubt she remembers it. But here I am, two decades later, writing thousands of words triggered by that one silly rhyme. Proof that even time bends to the stories we carry forward.
And maybe that’s the real takeaway. We chase precision. We draw lines. We sync satellites. But what binds the ticking world together isn’t perfect alignment- it’s shared imagination and storytelling. A collective agreement to say, “Okay, from now on, this is what noon means.” At least to most people. Some people still arrive an hour late.
It’s inconsistent, and fairly messy. And yet, somehow, it’s enough.
So the next time you look at your watch, your laptop clock, your prayer schedule, or your school bell- remember, it’s not just the hour that matters.
It’s the story behind how that hour came to be.
That’s it for this crumb, catch you in the next one!