Workin’ on the Railroad 


NOTE: This episode is a rebroadcast. There may be minor differences between the episode and the transcript you see below.
PETER: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century Guy. And I’m here with Ed Ayers, the 19th Century Guy, and Peter Onuf, our very own–

PETER: 18th Century Guy.

BRIAN: And what I need you to do, listener, is imagine in this past New Year’s Eve. Better yet, imagine 11:59, this past New Year’s Eve. Now, there’s a reasonable chance that you were standing in someone’s living room watching Ryan Seacrest as he counted down the final seconds before the New Year.

And whether you were in New York or somewhere else across the nation, you were counting the exact same sequence. This whole idea of people who are nowhere near each other doing something at exactly the same time, that had to be invented. And it was invented in the 1860s.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: As they’re beginning to finish the transcontinental railroad, they’re imagining a way of celebrating it simultaneously, having everybody in the country in on it, a simultaneous experience. Since it unites the East and West, wouldn’t it be great if everybody could know exactly when it’s done.

BRIAN: This is Mike O’Malley. He’s an historian at George Mason University. And he says that in 1869, this idea of a national moment of simultaneity was totally new. The Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad were about to meet up at Promontory Summit. And head honchos of the railroads decided to rig up this mechanism so that everyone could share in this moment.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: And they actually have a hammer which has got wires coming from it. On one end, the wires are connected to a telegraph. And then there’s other wires on the spike. And the idea is when the metal hammer hits the spike, click, the whole country will hear the click that indicates the blow that drives the last spike.

They’re all there. The trains are facing each other. There are all these railroad officials and tired and exultant workers hanging in the distance.

BRIAN: And Leland Stanford, one of the owners of the line coming from the Pacific to Utah, is granted the honor of driving the last spike, a spike made of 17 carat gold, mine you.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: So Stanford, who was pretty much a grocer before he became a railroad baron, raises the hammer and swings and thunk, he hits a wooden tie. He misses the spike completely. And the water breaks and that’s the end of that. So a telegraph operator just presses a button.

PETER: The signal shoots out across the lines and makes its way to the operators across the country. And everybody shares in their first simultaneously experienced moment ever, or so they thought.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: If you look at all over the country when the golden spike was driven, every city will tell you a different time and different newspapers within a given city will tell you a different time

PETER: And this is where our story for today really begins. Because in the 1860s, time was well, sort of every man for himself. Every railroad, every newspaper, every church, every town figured out the time on their own. There was no central authority on time.

MICHAEL O’MALLEY: So there’s three different times reported in San Francisco as to when that spike was actually driven because there is no Standard Time for San Francisco. So there’s no way to actually answer when the spike was driven. They have the idea of simultaneity, the intellectual idea, the capacity. But they don’t have the technology. They don’t have the means to make it happen.

ED: So in today’s special daylight saving episode of BackStory, we’re taking an hour to consider well, the meaning of an hour and how that’s changed over time. We’ll talk about how America went from a temporal, free-for-all, where literally anybody could decide what time it was, to a country fixated on keeping the same time. We’ll look at the impact electricity has had on people’s basic experience of day and night. And we’ll hear how a 24-second experiment saved one of America’s most beloved sports.