Time as we know it began only in the nineteenth century, after the Civil War. These two innovations, which appeared in America at almost the same historical moment, are the electric light bulb and the notion of standardized time. It's interesting to note that this loss of synchronization between the individual and his or her natural surroundings is a relatively recent phenomenon, at least in the degree to which we experience it today, and for this I blame two innovations that are fundamental to the benefits we enjoy in contemporary life, but which are definitely enemies of the natural sleep that our ancestors enjoyed. If we look beyond superficial explanations to explore genuinely fundamental causes, irregularities in the internal biological clock stand revealed as one of the most significant causes of insomnia. In other words, within two weeks we could be eating breakfast at midnight and getting into bed at dawn. This is very significant, because it suggests that if our internal pacemakers are not reset on a regular basis, they will begin leading us toward a schedule further and further from what the world considers regular hours. This study and later ones revealed that the human body operates on a cycle of approximately twenty-five hours.

If you were to argue seriously about the time, you would undoubtedly be considered quite odd. Today we completely accept the idea of one correct time that governs our lives: The time isn't a matter of individual opinion or interpretation, it is supposed to exist somewhere, perhaps in Greenwich, England, and we can hear it repeated on the telephone or the radio. But the transformation didn't come easily, for there was little public dissatisfaction with the multiple-time system. It was the railroads, in fact, that finally brought about the change to standardized time. Railroads, like towns, operated according to different versions of the time, depending on the location of their hub cities, and train stations displayed a selection of clocks, one for each of the various companies. For example, somehow, because of the way the sun appears to move across the sky from east to west, Sacramento, California, was more than three hours earlier than New York City - almost three thousand miles away - but Sacramento was also about four minutes later than nearby San Francisco. This could lead to problems of interpretation and correspondingly confusing results. Thus, "communities that were miles apart were also minutes apart." Until then, most regions determined their own time based on the position of the sun as they experienced it.