What Drove the Creation of Time Zones?

While researching a recent novella, I learned about the official adoption of the different time zones in the United States (and by default, Canada and Mexico).


In my story, Taming A Scandal, which is part of the Lockets and Lace series, I needed to move my characters from Rhode Island to central Texas, with a side-trip to Chicago and St. Joseph, Missouri. That train trip covered lots of miles, transported them along the rails owned by a variety of railroad companies offering a variety of services, and moved them from dense to moderate to sparse population. As you can imagine, reading those historical timetables for travel across the distances was confusing when arrival and departure times from the same city didn’t follow a logical progression.

I like to be as accurate as possible with the historical details included in my plots. I didn’t want to state that the heroine stepped onto the Fall River Steamboat in the bright sunshine when in reality, the only time the steamboat sailed from Newport, RI, was at 8:15 at night so the passengers arrived in New York by 7 in the morning. Many cities used their own time standard, and the Library of Congress estimates that at one point following the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, at least 300 local sun-times existed!

The railroad owners knew a better system needed to be put in place to allow people to use their railways to travel with the least delay. Railroad managers instituted 100 standard zones. But that short-term solution didn’t solve the problem. The railroad operators formally adopted using four standard time zones in the continental United States on November 18, 1883. (The Time Standard Act of 1918 made the zones official for the US)  In 1884, the International Meridian Conference with representatives from two dozen nations was held, and Greenwich was established as the prime meridian and Greenwich Mean Time as the world’s standard. The prime reason was because Britain had more ships and shipping companies using Greenwich than all the other shipping lines combined. A case of majority rules.


Even with only 4 zones in the US, I always have to stop and calculate when I’m supposed to be at an online meeting at a certain time. Anyone miss a flight or train connection because of a miscalculation?

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Release Day—Taming A Scandal

Today is release day for my second book in the multi-author “Lockets and Lace series by the authors of the Sweet Americana Sweethearts blog. Taking place from 1820-1920, these stories are linked by a visit to The Bavarian Watch and Jewelry Shop in St. Joseph, Missouri.

BLURB:

Socialite Mercia Saunders got evicted due to a touchy situation--which she feels was justified because it was for the sake of her art. Now her Philadelphia landlady has shipped her belongings to the family’s Newport, Rhode Island, home. Her father is livid and demands she choose between being courted by the hand-picked sons of prominent Newport business owners or live scandal-free with her oldest brother on a Texas cattle ranch. To a young woman raised with society, the ranch sounds like boring banishment, but she refuses to let her father choose her beau.

Pinkerton Agent Dominic Prentice is on the trail of a jewelry thief when he first meets the enticing Mercia—too bad he’s wearing the disguise of an elderly Southern gentleman. Then he’s assigned the task of keeping the art student under surveillance on a west-bound train to Texas. He can’t resist a railroad flirtation as himself, and the two draw closer than Mercia’s chaperones know. His allegiance to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency is tested when Dominic is forced to decide between tracking the jewelry or wooing the maiden.

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If you didn’t catch my first entry in this series, Tending Troubles, I put it on sale for only 99 cents through April 6^th. Both novellas, clean and wholesome romances, are stand-alone stories and have connections with my “Dorado, Texas” series.

BLURB

Traveling west to become a mail-order bride is the most adventurous act Bostonian Imogene Franklin ever did. Unfortunately, the groom chose another so now Imogene must make her way on her own. Dreading the idea of returning home to continue raising her siblings, she is reduced to waiting tables in the Dorado café. 
Guilt hangs heavy over Reggie Othmann—ever since he brought home a childhood illness that claimed both his parents’ lives. The ink is barely dry on Reggie’s degree when he arrives home in Dorado to establish a medical practice. All he’s wanted since he was ten years old is to help people, but the townspeople have been without a doctor for so long, they don’t flock through his doors as expected.
An illness sweeps the town, and Reggie is overwhelmed, fearing   he’s not qualified to heal them. Imogene steps in and together, they work hard to prevent anyone from dying, spending days together. Is their emotional tie born of the closeness of the ordeal or perhaps something more?

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