US time zones (1857) | Hacker News Reader

US time zones (1857)

en.wikipedia.org

81 pointscraigds36 comments

While each city and town having their own unique time-zone seems anarchic by today's standards, it actually made sense back then. Real-time interaction with other time zones simply did not happen and travel was an infrequent thing for most people. It made more sense for a time zone to be calculated specifically for a given location. That way high noon was at exactly the same time for any given town and sunrise, sunset, etc were the same for towns at the same latitude, rather than ranging anywhere within an hour (or more in some cases) as they do now. Today's approximate time zones arose as a trade-off between astronomical precision and convenience in a shrinking world.

In 1900 most Americans died within 5 miles of where they were born. In the 20th century that changed dramatically. The modern world is an immensely different place than the pre-modern world.

What about all the immigrants?

The word "most" likely applies. The number of foreign-born residents of the US probably peaked around 15% [EDIT: in relatively modern times] or so of the population in the early 20th century.

They weren't yet americans.

> In 1900 most Americans died within 5 miles of where they were born.

most

Your main point is well taken, but I'm skeptical of this particular statistic--is there a source for this? I can't decipher what it means.

Is it that of all the deaths in 1900, over 50% of those occurred within 5 miles of the birthplace of the person dying? Or that 50% of all people who were alive at some point in 1900 died within 5 miles of their birthplace?

Isn't it obvious? In 1900, over half the American population was wiped out within 5 miles of where they were born.

I don't know his source for 1900 or whether it refers to deaths in 1900, or people alive. However, here is some useful context about this idea.

The keyword for this phenomenon as used by the US Census is "Lifetime Mobility". It's calculated by comparing on long form census forms the given state of birth to the current residence. Obviously this doesn't take into account moving during one's life and moving back to one's hometown, so it's not entirely accurate for a measure of people who never leave home. It also has a very coarse granularity of state. In any case the finding was "Fifty-nine percent of people in the United States were born in their state of residence." Source: https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acsbr10-07.pdf

A 2011 Census analysis of migration data shows that mobility varies by region. At https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/pdf/2011-11-15_migr... see page 22 and note that for all age ranges, 50% or more remained in their state. For the midwest and northeast though numbers are higher - about 60-70%. The West is the anomaly with much higher rates of in migration. On page 23 we see Louisiana has the highest number of people remaining in state, 78.8% and Nevada the least at 24.3%. On page 43 we see the information we are looking for. Century trends of those born in the same state they now live in from 1900-2010. This is fairly interesting and surprising. It shows a century of very little migration in Pennsylvania where 76% live and were morn there, but decreasing numbers for Florida, with 65.2% born and living there in 1900, but 35.2% living there also born there in 2010.

A 2008 national phone survey went into more detail looking to break that state claim into those who never moved from their hometown at all. They found that "nearly four-in-ten — have never left the place in which they were born". Further along it explains in more detail "57% say they have not lived in the U.S. outside their current state: 37% have never left their hometown and 20% have left their hometown (or native country) but not lived outside their current state."

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/who-moves-who-stay...

So, if the number in 1900 was actually 50%, it is 37% now for people who never move from their town of birth.

A genetic analysis of strontium isotope ratios in early hominid teeth suggests that very long ago 90% of men stayed near where they were born, but 50% of females moved away to other areas.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/early-women-had-to...

I'm wondering how much of the last thousand years of culture is at risk. It's a new ecosystem without any local maximum. Globalization has value, but cultures too, and right now cultures are mostly 'preserved', they're not really alive, we keep tradition but I don't see new food, new art forms.. Am I wrong ?

Having isolated spaces to create leads to 'biodiversity'.

Anyone else having difficulty with their example problem? I keep getting 41 minutes difference, not 43.

That's fantastic.. the "simple" calculation was so simple that the example/explanation contained an error.

A classic example of adding when one should be subtracting, and the answer is close enough that the error isn't obvious.

The correct answer is 41, which is 12 - 31 + 60

From "How much is time wrong around the world?"[1] see this map shaded to show the difference between standard time and solar time: http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTime....

You can see that New York is pretty much still considered 'correct' whereas Odessa, TX is rather behind. Egregious examples worldwide include Argentina, most of Saskatchewan, Western China, most of Russia, and Eastern Greenland.

[1]: http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t...

Interesting how this relates to the transition of US culture towards "monochronic" time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronemics

Based on your reference, I'm not sure that standardized timezones so much transitioned US culture toward a more schedule-oriented environment as allowed it to expand to a larger scale. The banker in a specific city in Indiana with a 2pm meeting probably expected his appointment to show up at a specific time. Time zones made it more practical to schedule things across the country when it became more important to do so.

> Harrisburg, Pa. 12:01

Seriously?! They were one minute ahead of Washington DC.

Yes, why not? They are 200 km apart, coordination would be extra effort while the need for it was small.

The arguments used by this poster could be used today to argue for the abolishment of timezones in favor of universal adoption of UDT.

Until people start going to bed based on UTC that's not a realistic thing.

People are OK with modifying bedtime from suntime, for an hour, and probably even a few hours - but not much more than that.

Yeah, once you go to UTC half the world will have two dates for every daylight period, which is just the tip of the iceberg of the practical nightmares which will ensue.

Sometimes software engineers can get tunnel vision about the benefits of a particular reductive paradigm shift.

In the US you have Samuel Pierpont Langley and the Pennsylvania Railroad to thank for the modern time zone system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_time#North_America

I find it telling that that only Texas city listed was Galveston.

In what way? Prior to the 1900 hurricane, it would have been reasonable to pick Galveston as the pre-eminent city in Texas.

I would have thought Dallas or Fort Worth would have been picked...

In 1857, Dallas was a town of less than a thousand people, and Fort Worth was little more than a few people scattered around an abandoned army base. Galveston really was the biggest thing in Texas back then.

Galveston was actually the state capital of the Republic of Texas in the mid 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_state_capitals...

Interesting, too, that the only California city is Sacramento. This wasn't too long after the gold rush.

Also interesting is that there is no city with a reported time between Galveston's (10:49 AM) and Sacramento's (9:02 AM) - settlement essentially skipped over the inland western half of the country.

What we call today the Great Plains (specifically, the High Plains) was the Great American Desert 150 years ago. (The term comes from the fact that desert basically meant treeless back then, which the High Plains most certainly were). The land was basically unsettlable until the introduction of better plows, deep wells for irrigation, and the railroads to allow for efficient import/export. And the happy coincidence that the late 1800s were an unusually wet period that gave rise to the disastrous moniker, "rain follows the plow."

Time is kind of like programming. There's an underlying meaning (passage of time, functions) that is agreed upon but a million interpretations on how to implement.

That's true of all linguistic constructs.

Time zones are archaic. So many things would be simplified with a one world time.

Simpler isn't always better or easier. When traveling it's a lot easier to change your watch (or more likely, have your phone update automatically) than to re-calibrate your understanding of what times represent morning/lunch/bedtime/etc. Similarly when coordinating meetings or events across timezones, it's much easier to simply see that someone is 3 hours ahead of you than to try to guess roughly what they'll be up to at a given time of day based on their location, without the aid of time zones.

Unless you're suggesting that everyone keep the same hours everywhere. In which case I'm all for it, as long as my side of the world gets to be the one awake in the daytime.

I am pretty sure everyone's office hours (to take it as an example) are still going to be fixed at, say, -4 hours back from their noon till +5 hours forward, so instead of saying "UTC+4" people are going to need to learn to say "my noon is at 16:13" (or "16:00" even, i'm pretty sure no one will want to live by any offset from the "global" noon other than those evenly divisible by 30 minutes). Probably abolishing timezones is much less of a profound change than it seems to be.

So you're effectively substituting one form of synchronization for another that's already well established. After all, we already go to the trouble of using DST as a way to better synchronize within a timezone. (Which not everyone likes but I appreciate as a resident very far east in a timezone.)

We have that; it's called UTC.

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