> > Keeping accurate time is a modern thing. Before railroads, you could get along fine with just morning, noon, and night. Then the railroads came along and wanted to keep a schedule. They are largely responsible for time zones. I don't know who to blame for daylight savings time.
>
> Even before railways, accurate timekeeping was a prized skill, and accurate clocks were fairly common. The main influence the railways had was to standardise the time that different towns kept, which began with books detailing the difference between "railway time" and the time kept at each town. Only when this got too complicated did towns actually start keeping to railway time.
>
> wintermute

Yes. That's one of my favorite history lessons. But my point was that the common man, in those days mostly farmers, had little need for accurate time. The started milking at daybreak, and after that everything was done according to the position of the sun. If nobody in the family went to work in a store or office, an hour or so one way or the other was not important.

I remember hearing an old farm wife say that she started lunch for the field hands when the sun reached the back porch, and tried to have it ready when it reached a certain board on the porch. Even on cloudy days, nobody ever complained.
Howard