Standardized national time emerged only after instantaneous communications collapsed spatial distance.

Evidence

Public conceptions of time also changed in response to changing technology and culture and, as with space, in ways that prompted the emergence of modern environmental law in the 1970s. During the earlier course of the twentieth century, moreover, the collapse of spatial dimensions often implicated a collapse of temporal dimensions. The telegraph, and then the telephone, allowed instant communications between different parts of a state, the country, and, ultimately, the world. One could now travel across different time zones to arrive at a destination earlier than the “time” one had departed. It could be “Monday” for a person on one end of a telephone call and “Tuesday” for the person at the other end of the call. By sharp contrast, earlier in the nation’s history, no such uniform notion of time even existed: Someone in 1870 traveling by train between Washington, D.C. and San Francisco would pass through two hundred different time zones—and Philadelphia time was five minutes behind New York City time. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 292

Categorization

• CANDY: That a single 1870 rail journey crossed two hundred local time zones is an extraordinary number worth retelling.
• DEFINE: Illuminates why modern legal time-framing depends on collapsed spatial communications.
• XREF: connects to: The telegraph enabled temporal coordination that made standard time zones possible — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 857; Before standardization each US state maintained dozens of conflicting local time zones — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 847

Broader Connections

• The telegraph enabled temporal coordination that made standard time zones possible #corroborates (0.95) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 857
• Before standardization each US state maintained dozens of conflicting local time zones #expands (0.80) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 847