Railways, in the late 19th century, ushered in a revolution in transport, but with that arose one unexpected problem.
Back then, there was no standardized time, and every town and city kept their own clock which varied from their neighbors sometimes by several hours. This created grave inconvenience for rail travelers, because they couldn’t tell at what time a train would arrive at a particular station and how long a journey would be because arrivals and departures on railway timetables were published in local time. For the benefit of passengers, in 1857, one railway guidebook published the local times in approximately one hundred American cities compared to noon in Washington, and you can see how severe the problem was.
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Source: amusingplanet.com