Excerpt from Timekeepers by Simon Garfield, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

 The new pressure of time was the cause of some amusement. In 1862, the Railway Traveller's Handy Book, an indispensible guide to what to wear and how to comport oneself on the rails, and how to behave when going through a tunnel, contained a passage about the inexperienced traveller running to catch a train with time to spare: 'About five minutes before a train starts, a bell is rung as a signal to passengers to prepare for starting. Persons unaccustomed to travel by railway connect the ringing of the bell with the instant departure of the train, and it is most amusing to watch the novices running helter-skelter along the platform, tumbling over everything and everybody in their eagerness to catch the train which they believe is about to go without them.' Those who travelled often, on the other hand, would use the bell as a signal to stand 'by the carriage door coolly surveying the panic-stricken multitude…'

The final unifying stroke came in 1880, with the passage in parliament of the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act. It was now a public order offence to knowingly display the wrong time on municipal buildings. But beyond Great Britain, time ran on different tracks. France, a nation that had embraced the railways later than many of its European neighbours, found a way to adapt its traditionally perverse attitude to time to its new transport. While most stations adopted Paris time for their schedules and external clocks, clocks within station buildings consistently and deliberately ran five minutes early to ease the pressure on passengers who might arrive late (this lasted from about 1840 to 1880; regular passengers, of course, grew wise to the ruse and adjusted their own scheduling accordingly, a nice display of laissez faire).

In Germany the railways seemed to shrink time, as if a magical invention. When the theologian David Friedrich Strauss travelled from Heidelberg to Mannheim in the late-1840s he marveled at a journey that took 'half an hour instead of five hours'. In 1850 the Ludwigs Railroad company shrunk time even more, advertising a trip from Nuremberg to Fürth, travelling 'one and a half hours in ten minutes'. In his 'History of the Hour', the German theologian Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum notices persistent contemporary references to the railways causing 'the destruction of space and time' and 'the emancipation from nature'. As with Henry Booth in Liverpool, travellers cutting through mountains and spanning valleys estimated that the eradication of these obstacles practically doubled their lifespans. The imagination accelerated all possibilities.

The character of the nation, the volksgeist, determined that the trains not only consistently ran according to schedule but were shown to do so by station clocks synchronised from Berlin. But the acceptance of the transformation from 'external' local time to 'internal' railway time took more than fifty years. Germany was unified by railway time only in 1890s, but it was political and military expediency, rather than a concern for the passenger, that forced the move. In 1891, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, who had employed the railways effectively in his military campaigns in France, spoke in the Reichstag of the need for one clock throughout the country. The railways facilitated the greatest single improvement the military had encountered in his lifetime - enabling him to amass 430,000 men in four weeks  - but there was a dilemma to be overcome. 'Gentlemen, in Germany we have five different time zones. In north Germany, including Saxony, we use Berlin time; in Bavaria, Munich time; in Würtemburg, Stuttgart time; in Baden, Karlsruhe time; and in the Rhenish Palatinate, Ludwigshafen time. All the inconveniences and disadvantages which we dread encountering on the French and Russian frontiers, we experience today in our own country. This is, I may say, a ruin which has been left standing, a relic of the time of German disruption – a ruin which, now that we have become an Empire, should be completely erased.' And thus did Germany adopt the precision of Greenwich.

Excerpted from Timekeepers by Simon Garfield. Copyright © 2017 by Simon Garfield. Excerpted by permission of Canongate Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.