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couldn’t agree on when to set their clocks forward and back. On a single 35-mile stretch of highway between West Virginia and Ohio, for example, a traveler could pass through no less than seven time changes. Confusion reigned.
Bus Stop
    The transportation industry, led by the Greyhound Bus Company, lobbied hard to remedy the situation, and finally in 1966 Congress passed the Uniform Time Act. The law didn’t make Daylight Saving Time mandatory, but said that individual states needed to observe it or not on a uniform basis.
    Daylight Saving Time is now observed in about 70 countries around the world.
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    Note: It’s singular, not plural—it’s Daylight Saving, not Daylight Savings. Why? We’re saving daylight. According to the Department of Transportation, the United States saves about 1% of its energy every day DST is in effect. Maybe that makes it worth the effort for Americans to change three billion timepieces twice a year.
    WHY ARE THERE 24 HOURS IN A DAY?
    The standard started with the ancient Sumerians, who also invented the first known system of writing. Their mathematical system was based on the number 12, just as ours is based on the number 10. The Sumerians, it is surmised, counted not the 10 digits of the hands, but the 12 segments of the 4 fingers on each hand. Twelve was considered a magical number because it is the lowest number with the greatest number of divisors—it is easily split into half or thirds or quarters or sixths, whereas 10 can only be cut in half or into fifths.
    Their systems of weights, measures, and money were all based on 12, and so was their system of time. It was the Sumerians who first divided the day into 12 parts, with each segment equal to 2 of our hours. Later, the Egyptians modified the system by dividing the day into 24 segments. And in case you were wondering, the Babylonians are responsible for our current system of having 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute.
WHY ARE THERE TIME ZONES?
    You can thank the railroads for this one. Before the transcontinental railroads, there were no time zones. Noon in any city was whenever the sun reached the meridian of that particular place. Time actually varied by one minute for every 13 miles traveled, and cities only a few hundred miles apart had times that were different, which made scheduling trains very difficult. For example, when it was noon in Chicago, it was 12:31 in Pittsburgh, 12:17 in Toledo, 11:50 in St. Louis, and 11:27 in Omaha. At one time, U.S. railroads had nearly 300 different time zones. This lack of consistency wasn’t just inconvenient, it was dangerous. The possibility of train wrecks increased dramatically by the conflicting schedules. Something had to be done—not locally—but on a global basis.
    By 1847 Great Britain had a unified time system, which meant they had a single time zone across the entire country. That was fine for the small island nation. But it wasn’t as easy in North America—the United States and Canada cover some 60 degrees of longitude.
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    In 1872 the Time-Table Convention was founded in St. Louis to look for a solution. Charles Dowd, a school principal from New York, recommended that the U.S. set up standard time zones, and brought his idea to Congress. Most lawmakers agreed with the idea, but were afraid it would upset their constituents, so the bill was stalled on the House floor for more than a decade.
STANDARD SANFORD
    It wasn’t until Sir Sanford Fleming, a well-respected Canadian Railroad engineer, brought a specific solution to Washington that the idea began to take hold. His idea: because there are 24 hours in a day, divide the Earth’s 360 degrees by 24, which will create 24 equal time zones separated by 15 degrees.
    In 1882 the Standard Time system was finally adopted, officially dividing the United States into four time