How business changed your life: the invention of Standard Time
As we have noted previously, business has changed your life in ways difficult to imagine unless you study them. From Jack Beatty’s fine piece in the Atlantic a few years ago, we note one occasion. The needs of business caused the creation of Standard Time:
On November 18, 1883, at noon, U.S. railroad corporations unified American time. Nineteenth century America was a temporal wilderness. In the 1850s Americans set their watches in as many as a hundred local times. Wisconsin alone had thirty-eight, Illinois twenty-seven, Indiana twenty-three. When it was noon in Chicago it was 11:27 in Omaha, 11:50 in St. Louis, 12:09 in Louisville, and 12:31 in Pittsburgh. Nine A.M. arrived thirty seconds earlier in Oakland than it did across the bay in San Francisco. In Kansas City jewelers competed in times, posting their nominees for noon, which varied by as much as twenty minutes. Punctuality was negotiable in Kansas City.
An 1883 railway gazetteer included time conversion tables for more than 8000 stations. Fingers plowed the ink off dark columns of type, plotting a route across the temporal Babel. To depart a station under Time A for a station under Time B hoping to connect with another railroad operating under Time C required faith in the providence of algebra. Yet, perhaps because few traveled far, most Americans found this time-quilt tolerable, and many cherished it.
They took nature’s word for time, and nature said it was noon when the sun was directly overhead, at times that differed with locations. Town clocks, to be sure, were set not by sun dials but by almanacs that averaged the sun’s variations over months and years. A scattering of localities rented astronomically precise time from observatories, who wired them through Western Union. These innovations only wedded time the more exactly to place.
“[I]t would appear to be as difficult to alter by edict the ideas and habits of the people in regard to local time,” a U.S. Senate report concluded in 1882, “as it would be to introduce among them novel systems of weights [and] measures….” The Senate did not reckon with a self-sovereign power that, having “annihilated space,” sought dominion over time in the name of safety and convenience. The sun told time from Genesis to 12:00 on November 18, 1883, when the railroads imposed standard time as if “ideas” and “habits” held forever were debris on the track to modernity.
“The sun is no longer to boss the job,” the Indianapolis Centennial lamented. “People—55 million of them—must eat, sleep, and work as well as travel by railroad time…. The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time. The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange.” The railroad magnates rode the mystique of progress. With the founding of the Greenwich observatory in 1848, a world-wide movement to standardize time in zones of longitude gained momentum among scientists and other apostles of the future. That Greenwich promoted itself as the “prime meridian” consternated the French, who wanted Paris to hold that title. American time chauvinists likewise objected to “John Bull’s time.” The railroads themselves only slowly came round to the idea. Rate wars got in the way. But as competition yielded to consolidation, resistance weakened.
Standard time’s advantages were made vivid to railroad managers at an 1883 Railway Time Convention when William Allen, the editor of the Traveler’s Official Guide to railways, put two maps on display. One depicted the prevailing fifty different times in a fling of colors. The other showed four bands of color, north to south, 15 degrees of longitude apart. Here, Allen said of the old map, depicted in the clashing hues of competition, is “the barbarism of the past.” The new map, a consolidated rainbow, represented “the enlightenment we hope for in the future.” No more mind-taxing schedules; no more head-on collisions of trains operating in clashing times; no more time chaos.
Mussolini could never had made the trains run on time if not for the Robber Barons of the US!
October 12th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
HOW SHARIAH IS AFFECTING LIVES IN USA COUTERY OF MBAs
AP
Islamic-Safe Finance Grows in the West
Thursday October 12, 3:44 pm ET
By Joshua Freed, AP Business Writer
AP Centerpiece: Western Businesses Look for Ways to Attract Muslim Investors
By following financial rules that are part of the Islamic code called Shariah, Caribou is among a small but growing list of Western businesses looking to make themselves as attractive as possible to Muslim investors. Some, like Caribou, are motivated by principle, while others see Muslim investors as an attractive new source of money.
Middle Eastern investors flush with oil profits are looking for new places to invest, and American Muslims are looking to invest in a way that doesn’t conflict with their faith.
“There’s a bunch of Islamic investors who are prohibited from a lot of regular investments, so a lot of money is sitting in cash not earning anything at all,” said Khalid Howladar, a vice president for Middle Eastern and Islamic Structured Finance with Moody’s Investors Service in London.
Companies and governments who need to raise money are saying, “‘There’s a bunch of people out there with money they can’t spend — how about I create something for them?’” he added.
Dow Jones has created an Islamic investing index. A Texas company issued almost $166 million in Shariah-compliant bonds to finance natural gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico. And the German state of Saxony-Anhalt issued a floating-rate 100-million euro note — managed by Citigroup — that followed Shariah rules.
Assets invested at two Shariah-compliant funds run by Saturna Capital in Bellingham, Wash. have swelled nearly 10-fold, since 2002 from $34 million in 2002 to $331 million now — though that’s still tiny by mutual fund standards. The funds invest only in companies that are Shariah-compliant.
Islamic financial rules come from passages in the Quran that prohibit “riba” — making money from money. Generally, that means not paying or collecting interest, though some scholars say only abusively high interest rates are prohibited. Other prohibitions are more moral than financial, such as a ban on selling pork.
While many Muslims have invested conventionally in the West for years, some did so because they had few alternatives.
Moazzam Ahmed, a software engineer from Carrollton, Texas, has no car loans. Credit-card charges go on a zero-percent card or get paid off at the end of every month. And he’s got a home mortgage that is a lease-buyback arrangement, rather than an interest-bearing loan, a frequent arrangement among Muslims looking to buy homes while obeying Shariah.
But he fretted about his conventional retirement investments until four years ago, when he discovered the Saturna funds.
“As soon as I found out about it I switched everything to it,” he said. “I would have loved to do it from Day One, but it wasn’t available, or at least I didn’t know about it,” he said. He said his returns have been as good as, or better than, more conventional investments he could have made.
The Glenmary Research Center of Nashville, Tenn., estimated that there were about 1.6 million Muslims in the United States in 2000, the first time it gathered information on Islam as part of the census of religious groups it carries out every 10 years.
Eric Meyer, who runs a Connecticut-based hedge fund called Shariah Capital, says Western banks and financial institutions need to have Shariah-compliant products or risk losing market share.
“There is a younger generation of Muslims who grew up during the last 20 to 30 years that have a reawakened sense of nationalism and religious pride that motivates them to invest according to their faith,” he said.
But in Western finance, it takes some creativity to avoid earning or paying interest.
To borrow money, Shariah-compliant companies often pledge the lender a share of the profits from an asset instead of interest. Investors who need to earn a shorter-term return can contract to buy, say, $100 of copper today, and simultaneously pledge to sell copper in 90 days for, say, $103.
Caribou Coffee Company Inc., for instance, has a revolving line of credit. But instead of paying interest, it sells assets and then pays to lease them back.
“It’s fair to say we do things a little differently,” said Charles Ogburn, Global Head of Corporate Investment at the firm that controls a majority of Caribou stock, Bahrain-based Arcapita Bank B.S.C.
Ogburn said when he joined Arcapita five years ago, there were perhaps two or three U.S. banks who had done those kinds of loans. Now it’s more like 25 or 30.
Many companies follow Shariah without even trying.
To build its index, Dow Jones in 1999 hired six Shariah scholars to set standards to screen companies. Out of 5,000, Dow Jones found 1,800 that met its standards, including drugmakers Merck & Co. and Pfizer Inc., BP PLC, Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., and IBM Corp.
“I don’t think that many of them know about Shariah-compliant investing, frankly speaking,” said Rushdi Siddiqui, Dow Jones’ director of Islamic market indexes.
Dow Jones now has over 60 Islamic indexes that track Shariah-compliant stocks and bonds. Siddiqui said about 30 firms have licensed the indexes, and about $5.5 billion in investments are managed in line with the indexes.
The indexes are not as strict as some might prefer. The Dow Jones indexes include companies with debt that’s as much as one-third of their market capitalization, and allows companies that generate some interest.
In fact, the wide range of what counts as Shariah-compliant can be frustrating for businesses that want to raise money that way. Investment firms retain councils of Islamic scholars who determine whether a transaction complies with their interpretation of the rules, adding an extra layer of complexity to already complicated deals.
But some investors appreciate companies willing to do so.
Shirin Elkoshairi, who works for a technology company and lives in Ashland, Va., said he is getting ready to switch his investments over to a Shariah-compliant mutual fund. He already has a Shariah-compliant mortgage.
“At the end of the day, you know you’re living in a house and you can actually put your head down at night and not feel bad for going against Islamic shariah,” he said.
Arcapita Bank B.S.C.: http://www.arcapita.com
Liquidity Management Centre: http://www.lmcbahrain.com
have a nice day america
October 12th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
This is something with which I am familiar. The question of public safety was important, too.
Longitude is a relative position east-west on the earth- one is so and so many degrees east or west of some specific point. The reason Greenwich was the main world time benchmark (long before 1848, I don’t know where he got that date) was that the only practical method of determining longitude required knowledge of what the time was at a known spot on the earth at the same moment the sun’s angle was observed at the position seeker’s spot.
Since the Royal Navy used Greenwich time, longitude was shown on British Navy charts degrees from Greenwich. The Royal navy went more places than any one else, and its navigators were considered the most reliable overall. The admiralty made its charts publicly available, and in the 19th century assigned itself the mission of mapping the seas of the earth. Thus the Greenwich importance.
The U. S. time conference came close to adopting G.M.T. as the national standard, as the world time conference shortly later. Had the decision been made today, it clearly would. I suspect a day will come when that happens.
The Navy’s charting work, like its fight against the slave trade, are two great works of governmental decency.
And STAY AWAY FROM GREENWICH. It is a lovely quiet spot filled with beauty. Don’t crowd it.
October 12th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
They could’a mentioned that it was a Canadian, Sir Sandford Flemming, who initiated what became Standard Time in North America.
October 12th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
The Prime Meridian story was covered in Dava Sobel’s book Longitude.
Greenwich was the Prime Meridian as a result of a conference in Washington D.C. in the 1800s.
The French reportedly were furious that the U.S. sided with England on the question.
The more things change . . .
October 13th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Cool. this piece is a perfect use of the blog!