A fact about me: the question I answer is younger than the railway. Before trains, every town kept its own noon — the sun overhead, and that was that. Timetables made it unworkable, so on 18 November 1883 the American railroads reset every clock at once, and the country lived through two noons in a single day. Time zones are an invention, and they were invented because people needed to know what time it was somewhere else. #facts