"I have been thinking, Dad," said Steve that evening, while they sat at dinner, "of the railroad story you told me this morning. It was some yarn." His father laughed over the top of his coffee cup.
"It was, wasn't it?" replied he. "And the half was not told then. I was in too much of a hurry to give you an idea of all the trials the poor railroad builders encountered. Did it occur to you, for example, that after the roads to the Pacific coast were laid their managers were confronted by another great difficulty,—the difference in time between the east and the west?"
"I never thought of that," was Steve's answer. "Of course the time must have differed a lot."
"Indeed it did! Every little branch road followed the time peculiar to its own section of the country, and the task of unifying this so that a basis for a common time-table could be adopted was tremendous. A convention of scientists from every section of the country was called to see what could be done about the fifty-three different times in use by the various railroads."
"Fifty-three!" ejaculated Stephen, with a grin. "Why, that was almost as many as Heinz pickles."
"In this case the results of the fifty-three varieties were far more menacing, I am afraid, than those of the fifty-seven," said his father, with a smile, "for travel under such a régime was positively unsafe."
"I can see that it would be. What did they do?"
"Well, after every sort of suggestion had been presented it was decided to divide the country up into four immense parts, separated from one another by imaginary lines running north and south."
"Degrees of longitude?"
"Precisely!" returned Mr. Tolman, gratified that the boy had caught the point so intelligently. "The time of each of these sections jumped fifteen degrees, or one hour, and the railroads lying in each district were obliged to conform to the standard time of their locality. Until this movement went into effect there had been, for example, six so-called standard times to reckon with in going from Boston to Washington."