The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1883-11-14
The Bangor MAYORS objections

The Mayor of Bangor has vetoed the or
der of the City Council of that city to change
the clocks to conform to the railway stan
dard. His reasons are three in number and
10 substance as follows: ~ that the change
is not likely to be made 10 sections remote
from the railroad. and therefore change in
towns along the railroad will not produce
uniformity; ~ that there are grave doubts
of the constitutional right of city council
TO make such a change; ~ that change
is likely to result in more disadvantage than
benefit.
Neither of these objections to the pre-
posed change seems to be well taken. The
first is based on the assumption that back
towns are SO welded to their local time, or
would be SO much inconvenience by a
change that they will refuse to adopt the
railway standard. Now If the mayor of
Bangor will make tour of the back towns
and inspect the clocks we venture to say he
will find few of them keeping exact mean
local time. He will find some of them fast
and some of tkem slow, and very few of
them just right. Yet if he inquiries if the
farmers suffer any serious inconvenience
from the inaccuracy of their clocks, be will
in every case receive a negative answer
He will find also that when country clocks
are regulated they are generally regulated
by city clocks. Farmers are not generally
provided with chronometers and quadrants
to ascertain the exact local time. When
they go to the city. they take their watches
along with them and set them by city time.
In all probability they will do precisely the
same thing after the city clocks are changed
to the railway standard
As to the constitutionality of the change,
that does not seem to be a matter requiring
serious attention. Some legislation may
be advisable legalizing the use of the
time of the Philadelphia meridian in the re-
cording of deeds and other legal instru-
ments, but until that is had all difficulty
can be obviated by the use of local time for
such purposes. The mayor hints at moral
objection when he says, "If we do cause all
of our clocks to point TO certain hour at
high noon, it is not SO. but twenty four min
utes, fifty-six and three-quartegs seconds from
that time.' The answer to this is that our
clocks as now regulated, do not keep true
solar time. There are very few days in the
year when the clocks and the sun are togeth-
er at noon. Our clocks are belieing the sun
now. Under the proposed change they viii
belle the sun little more, but as we shall
know just how much more, the clocks will
be guilty of no more deception than at
present.
The mayors last objection is founded on
the assumption that the change will incon-
venience much larger number of people
than 1t will convenience. Certainly it
would convenience every traveller, and
every person who sends freight by the rail-
roads, In city like Bangor, this class is
very large. Who will be Inconvenience by
itP The mayor neglects to tell us and we
confess ourselves unable to supply the omis-
sion. But we can see that a great many
people will suffer Inconvenience of serious
kind if the railroads use one time and the
city another, and the advantage of this new
arrangement to the railroads is SO great that
there is no probability that they will be pre-
vented from using it by the refusal of some
places to make the local standard conform
to it.