Historian Kristen Lippincott on why the railways forced Britain onto a single national time. She explains that this led to the 1847 railway time system based on Greenwich Mean Time. From an archive episode of the BBC's In Our Time.
Friday and empire. Trade and empire.
…from the sea to the land, the development of the railways, references being made several times in this program to different places. Bristol had a different time from London and so on. This didn't work, so they were looking for a national time and then a global time. Can you take us through that?
Yes, well, in England, for example, in the 1840s, everyone kept local time. So that's, as you were saying, Bristol might be, say, 20 minutes behind London, because that was the time that the sun passed the local meridian at noon. But with travel, with commerce, you suddenly had people, if you like, being able to move faster than the sun. So if you left London and took a train to Bristol, you would arrive 20 minutes early by the Bristol time. So it was really in the 1847 that there was an internet, our national railway time system that was based on Greenwich Mean Time.
Was there much resistance to it?
There was a lot of resistance. We want
our own time in Bristol.