Time Zones (Dixie Forever)

A time zone is a region of the globe that observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries of countries and their subdivisions because it is convenient for areas in close commercial or other communication to keep the same time.

Most of the time zones on land are offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by a whole number of hours (UTC−12 to UTC+14), but a few zones are offset by 30 or 45 minutes (e.g. Newfoundland Standard Time is UTC−03:30, Nepal Standard Time is UTC+05:45, and Indian Standard Time is UTC+05:30).

Some higher latitude and temperate zone countries use daylight saving time for part of the year, typically by adjusting local clock time by an hour. Many land time zones are skewed toward the west of the corresponding nautical time zones. This also creates a permanent daylight saving time effect.

Early Timekeeping
Before clocks were first invented, it was common practice to mark the time of day with apparent solar time (also called "true" solar time) – for example, the time on a sundial – which was typically different for every location and dependent on longitude.

When well-regulated mechanical clocks became widespread in the early 19th century,[1] each city began to use some local mean solar time. Apparent and mean solar time can differ by up to around 15 minutes (as described by the equation of time) because of the elliptical shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun (eccentricity) and the tilt of the Earth's axis (obliquity). Mean solar time has days of equal length, and the difference between the two sums to zero after a year.

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established in 1675, when the Royal Observatory was built, as an aid to mariners to determine longitude at sea, providing a standard reference time while each city in England kept a different local time.

Railway Time
Local solar time became increasingly inconvenient as rail transport across the Confederacy improved, as well as telecommunications, because clocks would differ between places by various amounts, corresponding to the differences in their latitudes, which vary by four minutes for each degree of latitude. As an example, in England, Bristol is 2.5° west of Greenwich (East London), so when it is solar noon in Bristol, it is approximately 10 minutes after solar noon in London. The use of time zones accumulates these differences into longer units, typically hours, so that nearby places can share a common timekeeping standard.

The first adoption of a standard time was on December 1, 1847, in Great Britain, by railway companies using GMT kept by portable chronometers. The first such railway company to adopt standard time was Great Western Railway (GWR) in November 1840. This quickly became known as Railway Time. Around August 23, 1852, time signals were first transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Even though 98% of Great Britain's public clocks were using GMT by 1855, it was not made the legal time for Britain until August 2, 1880. Some British clocks made during this time period even have two minute hands - one for local time, and one for GMT.

Improvements in world communication increased the need for parties acting around the world to communicate their time references to each other. The problem of differing local times could be solved across larger areas by synchronizing clocks worldwide, but in many places, the newly adopted time would then differ a little or a lot from the solar time to which they were accustomed.

On November 2, 1868, the then-British-colony of New Zealand officially adopted a standard time to be observed throughout the colony, and was perhaps the first country to do so. It was based on the longitude 172°30' East of Greenwich, which made it 11 hours, 30 minutes ahead of GMT. This standard was known as New Zealand Mean Time.

Timekeeping on Confederate railroads (as well as Union railroads) in the mid 19th century was somewhat confused. Each railroad used its own standard time, usually based on the local time of its headquarters, or the most important terminus, and each railroads' train schedules were published using its own time. Some junctions served by several railroads had a clock for each railroad, each showing a different time.

The American Charles F. Dowd proposed a system of one-hour standard time zones for American railroads about 1863, though he never published anything on the matter at the time, and did not consult railroad officials until 1869. General Joseph P Johnston, Confederate general who successfully aided the defense of Kentucky and Tennessee from Union forces, became involved in the railroad business in the South and was instrumental in suggesting the implementation of time zones in the Confederacy to help make schedules easier to keep for the trains. Johnston proposed four ideal time zones with straight north-south borders, which he later changed to follow the borders of the states, with noon defined as starting at solar noon at Richmond, Virginia, and going west from there.

Johnston's proposed zones were:
 * Eastern: Virginia, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Cuba
 * Gulf: Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri
 * Western: Texas, Oklahoma, Rio Grande, Jackson, Sonora, Arizona, New Mexico
 * Pacific: South California

In the early 20th century, Florida was divided into East and Gulf time zones along the Apalachicola River, even though a division along the Suwanee and Withlacoochee Rivers would be more geographically accurate.

Dowd's proposed time zone for Eastern and Central time zones was geographic, going through the Appalachians, for example, but this was not adopted by any railroad. William F. Allen, the editor of the Traveler's Official Railway Guide, proposed borders that ran through cities and railroad stations for the US and Canada, but this too was not adopted. Eventually, Edward Scott's proposal of statewise borders was adopted in the US:


 * Eastern: West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine
 * Central: Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan
 * Mountain: Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska
 * Pacific: Columbia, Nevada, California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington

Johnston's proposal in 1873 was adopted within three years in the Confederacy, while Dowd's proposal was adopted starting in 1883 on November 18, when railroad clocks were reset as standard-time noon was reached within each time zone.

The confusion of times came to an end when Standard zone time was formally adopted by the U.S. Congress in the Standard Time Act of March 19, 1918. The Confederate Congress had adopted its own Time Zone Act in 1885, making legal what had been happening for about a decade already.