Local time

“ If required for the benefit of the citizens of each place, a second minute hand can be added to each of these secondary clocks, so that the local time of each station can be indicated, while at the same time each railway-clock affords the means to each railway-employé of correcting his own watch. ”

“ Standard time, the civil time that has been established by law or by general usage over a region or country. In England the standard time is Greenwich mean solar time. In the United States and Canada four kinds of standard time have been adopted by the railroads and accepted by the people, viz., Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time, corresponding severally to the mean local times of the 75th, 90th, 105th, and 120th meridians west from Greenwich, and being therefore five, six, seven, and eight hours slower than Greenwich time. ”

“ To-day time means so much to us that we will fight our way into a subway express, instead of riding more comfortably in a local train, merely for the sake of saving five minutes. The tiny second hands of our watches divide the day into eighty-six thousand four hundred parts, and in some operations we measure time intervals down to the thousandth part of a second. Only among the most highly civilized nations are timepieces carried by the common people. ”

“ Mr. de Struve, Delegate of Russia. On behalf of the Delegates of Russia, I beg to make the following remarks:
We have already expressed the opinion that the universal time could be properly used for international postal, railway, and telegraphic communications. But it is to be understood that local or any other standard time, which is intimately connected with daily life, will necessarily be used side by side with the universal time. ”

“ Supper-time in the American road-house is an hour severely observed, and you disregard it at the peril of your empty stomach, for no larders seem so hermetically sealed as the larders of American country hotels after the appointed hour, and no favour so impossible to grant as even a ham sandwich, if you should be so much a stranger to local ordinances as to expect it after the striking of the hour. ”

“ All over the Solar System, except on Earth itself, the clocks read the same as they do in Greenwich, England. Time zones don't mean anything anywhere except on Earth, where the natives feel that the sun should be at the zenith when the clock says twelve. ”

“ Horology, as of old, is one of the exact sciences; but we find upon every street, electrically-driven clocks telling to the tenth of a second the time of day or night; the twenty-four hour system having come into general use about 1900, and London time being kept in every city in the civilized world. ”

“ It was scarcely ten o'clock in the morning, the hour most agreeable for walking, and frequently the most retired, as the fashionables of Paris seldom make their appearance before three or four o'clock, and in a déshabille that bespeaks them just arisen from their beds, as if to behold the sun for the first time. ”

“ The city time measurers are so far behind each other that the last chime of eight has hardly fallen on the ear from the last church, when another sprightly clock is heard to begin the hour of nine. Each clock, however, governs, and is believed in by, its own immediate neighbourhood. ”

“ Eleven o’clock at night is the great supper-time of the working classes; then, by the steady and industrious mechanic, the final calumet is smoked, the borrowed newspaper read, the topics of the day, the prospects of the coming week, discussed with the cheery and hard-working helpmate who sits by the side of her horny-handed lord, fills his pipe, pours out his beer, and darns the little children’s hose. ”

“ No beauty or variety makes us weary less for home. We count the days, and say, 'When May comes, and we can say—next month—the time will seem almost gone.' We are never tired of imagining what you are all about. I allow of no calculation for the difference of clocks, but insist on a corresponding minute in London. It is much the shortest way, and best. . . . Yesterday, we drank your health and many happy returns—in wine, after dinner; in a small milk-pot jug of gin-punch, at night. ”

“ Some Chinese and Japanese methods of dividing the day and night are indicated in Fig. 1. The old Japanese method divides the day into six hours and the night also into six, each hour averaging twice as long as ours. In some cases they did this by changing the rate of the clock, and in others by letting the clock run uniformly and changing the hour marks on the dial, but this will come later when we reach Japanese clocks.
It is remarkable that at the present time in England the “saving daylight” agitation is virtually an attempt to go back to this discarded system. ”

“ While I am walking with Michael some one often comes to me to ask the time of day. Few of the people, however, are sufficiently used to modern time to understand in more than a vague way the convention of the hours, and when I tell them what o'clock it is by my watch they are not satisfied, and ask how long is left them before the twilight. ”

“ Another clock in a dignified church tower also struck ten, but with far greater solemnity, as though reminding the town clock that time is not to be measured out to man as a mere matter of business, but intoned savingly and warningly as the chief commodity of salvation. ”

“ From six to seven o'clock is a busy time; breakfast is to be eaten, the tents struck, the wagons loaded, and the teams yoked and brought up in readiness to be attached to their respective wagons. All know when, at seven o'clock, the signal to march sounds, that those not ready to take their proper places in the line of march must fall into the dusty rear for the day. ”

“ Now, the exact time of the day at the place where we are, can be ascertained by well known and easy observations of the Sun if visible for a few minutes at any time from his being ten degrees high until within an hour of noon, or from an hour after noon until he is only 10 degrees high in the afternoon; if therefore, at any time when such observation is made, a Timekeeper tells us at the same moment what o'clock it is at the place we sailed from, our Longitude is clearly discovered. ”

“ When I speak of government by the clock, I should, perhaps, use capital letters to indicate that I have in mind that timepiece on which is recorded God's Time; whose ticking is the forward march of progress. Clocks as they touch our lives require human intervention. The winders of these clocks perform something that may be described as an office. ”

“ Of course, without an arbitrary public space-time, a public clock, states of consciousness from individual to individual could never be co-ordinated. For example, you have come straight from Mr. Jeffreson’s twelve-noon to my ten o’clock p.m. But the public clock, which you will see out there in the street—we are in Königsberg; I have no visual imagination and must rely entirely on memory for my scenery—the public dock, I say, marks time at a quarter to eight ”

“ To railroad-men and watch-makers as a matter of necessity, to manufacturers and business-men as a matter of economy, and to individuals as a matter of convenience, it has come to be highly important to know what is the exact time of day to the second, in circumstances where half a century ago it would have quite sufficed to know the minute or even the hour. ”

“ But as we shall have to sit up very late to-night—or rather early to-morrow morning—I think it right that we should pass the time till midnight in a quiet and decorous manner. Not but that we have been exceedingly well-behaved ever since the commencement of our peripatetics; but life is life, and one can scarcely go twice round the clock in London without some moral and physical wear and tear. Suppose we drop in at a Conversazione. ”

“ At the present time, from the Atlantic Ocean at the eastern extremity of New Brunswick, to the Pacific coast at Oregon, the minute-hands of the railway clocks and watches indicate the same minute of time at all hours, and fully fifty million people regulate their business affairs by standard time. ”

“ In ancient books the word cloche simply stands for a bell,—the monks being accustomed to ring a bell at certain periods marked for them by their sun-dials or hour-glasses, and 'What's o'clock?' in old writers is often merely equivalent to the inquiry, 'What hour was last struck by bell?' The word horologe or hour-measurer of course equally applied to the sun-dial, the clepsydra, and the clock, and this convertibility of terms makes it all the more difficult to trace the point at which the newer invention began. ”

“ When it reaches its greatest height over a western city it has, therefore, already passed its greatest height over an eastern one. In other words, when it is noon, or twelve o'clock, in the western city, it is already after noon in the eastern city. This is the simple and evident cause of time differences in different parts of the country. Of any two places the eastern one always has later time than the western. ”

“ In the city the burglar finds most people asleep at dawn; in the country most people wake with the dawn. I knew I must start early and set one o’clock as the hour to begin. Allowing myself two hours to get in, get action, and get out, I could have it over by three o’clock, which would give me time to plant the money and be in my room before daylight. My parcel of instruments and a gun were planted a few blocks away. ”

“ I have known instances where workmen have worked from Monday until Thursday, night and day, without any intermission, excepting the hour and a half at the morning change of hands, one hour at noon, one at tea-time, and half an hour at midnight,—four hours out of the twenty-four. ”

“ If you doubt the truth of the following, ask any traveller who has rushed through the States at the rate of two hundred and fifty miles an hour to verify it.
You sit down to the principal meal of the day in the dining car at say six o'clock. Not happening to be an American, you intend to eat your meal in a reasonable time, say an hour, instead of five minutes. Why hurry? What is there to do before retiring to the sleeping car to be jolted sleeplessly about for seven or eight hours? ”

“ Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the mechanical clock, the dread symbol of the flow of time, and the chimes of countless clock towers that echo day and night over West Europe are perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world-feeling is 15capable. [8] In the timeless countrysides and cities of the Classical world, we find nothing of the sort. Till the epoch of Pericles, the time of day was estimated merely by the length of shadow, and it was only from that of Aristotle that the word ὥρα received the (Babylonian) significance of “hour” ”

“ Every degree by meridians is equal to four minutes of clock-time. Multiply the longitude by four, and the result in minutes is the difference of time between Greenwich and Aden, 180 minutes, or three hours. When it is noon at Greenwich, it is three o'clock at Aden, as you see in the diagram before you."
"Three o'clock in the morning, Mr. Scott?" queried the commander.
"In the afternoon, I should have added. Going east the time is faster, and vice versa," continued the young officer. ”

“ Call and see this clock and you will find that the City Hall officials sustain the good name of Philadelphia for politeness. Generally, we give no attention to the hour numerals, even of our watches, as the following proves. When you have taken out your watch and looked at the time, for yourself, and put it back in your pocket, and when a friend asks the time you take it out again to find the time for him! Why? Because, for yourself, you did not read hours and minutes, but only got a mental impression from the position of the hands ”

“ The utility of a Public Clock is considerably enhanced by its being provided with a dial marking the time in the simplest and most unmistakeable lines, so that it may readily be ascertained at any reasonable distance from the clock-tower what is the hour either by day or night. ”

“ The man who usually takes a car to get from Thirty-third Street to Times Square, who occasionally lets the barber rub tonic on the top of his head, who carries blocks and dolls home on Saturday, who is morbidly interested in building loans and grass-seed, [Pg 71] regards the noon hour as at worst a time for shopping and at best a time for eating. But to the young man, particularly to the young man for the first time a wage-earner in the city, the noon hour is a time for splendid adventuring. ”

“ The latter are made with such accuracy as to correct the time of other clocks, such as turret and church clocks, which are more exposed to the influence of the weather, and are necessarily made upon a coarser scale. In large mansions there is no handsomer or more necessary appointment for the hall or vestibule than a fine eight-day clock, 'to welcome the coming, speed the parting guest,' and to give the time of day to the entire household. ”

“ The eyes of the immense crowd are ever being turned towards the lighted clock-face of the "Auld and Faithfu" Tron, the hour approaches, the hands seem to stand still, but in one second more the hurrahing, the cheering, the hand-shaking, the health-drinking, the swaying to and fro of the immense throng, is all kept up as long as the clock continues to ring out the much-longed-for midnight hour. ”

“ We do not dispense with clocks, because from time to time they go wrong, and tell untruly. A clock, organically considered, may be perfect, yet it may require regulating. Till that needful work is done, the moment-hand may mark the half-minute, when the minute-hand is at the quarter-past, and the hour hand is just at noon, and the quarter-bell strikes the three-quarters, and the hour-bell strikes four, while the sun-dial precisely tells two o’clock. ”