Inside the Allegheny Observatory, in a quiet, carpeted room off of one of the building’s rotundas, sits a telescope from the 1860s. Though the Observatory houses three working telescopes under three lofty domes — currently used to glimpse faraway nebulae and hunt for exoplanets — the smaller telescope points to the building’s more earthly origins. Known as a transit telescope, the apparatus was used to measure sidereal time, or “star time,” the basis for modern timekeeping.
At the Observatory, someone would sprawl out in a “comfy lounge chair, because [they] would spend the whole night laying under [the transit telescope],” explains outreach coordinator Kerry Handron, “looking at the stars crossing over” the sky.
Measuring stars’ positions enabled astronomers to calculate solar time, “the time that we use on a day-to-day basis,” says Handron, and the Observatory transmitted that time using a telegraph machine — also still on display today.
Pittsburgh has been home to many notable inventions, but our contemporary notion of time itself (aka standard time) doesn’t typically top the list. Yet for a period of about 30 years in the late 19th century, a significant portion of the country operated on Allegheny Standard Time or the Allegheny Time System, as measured at the Observatory. The innovation is highlighted as one of many advancements made at the Observatory on its popular public tours and provides insight into the city’s industrial past.
Ahead of the end of daylight savings time — another Pittsburgh invention, spun out of standard time — Pittsburgh City Paper visited the Observatory, a designated historic landmark rife with hidden gems including a crypt.
Founded in 1859, the Observatory was originally formed as a private club, the Allegheny Telescope Association — “kind of like a country club,” says Handron. Wealthy industrialists from what was then an unannexed Allegheny City met to buy a telescope, “the magnifying power of which would bring the heavenly bodies near enough to be viewed with greater interest and satisfaction,” reads a founding quote on the Observatory website.
Among the club’s first purchases was a 13-inch refracting telescope, constructed in 1861. At the time, it was the third largest telescope in the world, capable of viewing the moon and planets of our Solar System, and it remains in use today as the Fitz-Clark Refractor telescope under the Observatory’s smallest dome.
By 1867, the club had fallen into debt and disrepair. During the Civil War, as captains of industry focused on the war effort, says Handron, both the telescope and the building weren’t maintained properly. The club voted to donate both to the Western University of Pennsylvania (later the University of Pittsburgh, where the Observatory is still part of the physics and astronomy department).
The same year, the university appointed Samuel Pierpont Langley, an astrophysics professor, as the Observatory’s first director. Langley, also an aviator, modeled aircrafts that predated the Wright brothers; using the telescope to observe the sun’s corona, he drew sunspots so detailed that they still appear in today’s astronomy textbooks.
But another lasting contribution, made in order to fundraise and save the Observatory, began with an appeal to William Thaw Sr., principal of the Pennsylvania Railroad and one the 100 wealthiest Americans ever (if the Thaw name rings a bell, Thaw Sr. was also the father of Harry Kendall Thaw, defendant in the original murder “trial of the century”).
Thaw Sr. provided funds to improve the Observatory’s equipment, build additional instruments, and acquire the transit telescope. He and Langley quickly realized its huge potential benefit to the railroad industry.
At the time, the Pennsylvania Railroad was “like Amazon and Google [combined] for half the country,” says Handron. “It had all the transportation and all of the communication going from the East Coast to the middle of the country.” At its peak in 1881, the “Pennsy” was the country’s largest railroad, largest transportation enterprise, and the largest corporation in the world.
Yet, 150 years ago, standard time to keep the trains running smoothly didn’t exist. As a 2009 exhibit at the Heinz History Center detailed, before industrialization, most of timekeeping was done by simply looking at the sun and observing shadows while it was at its highest point, à la a sundial.
While the method was inexact, and time would vary by a few minutes from town to town, “it didn’t much matter,” Handron explains. “But now the trains were going at the unheard-of speeds of 40 miles an hour. You needed to know where [they] were, and you needed them to leave at the proper times.”
Operators also needed to know the local time at two different points to coordinate. Instead, the Pennsylvania Railroad used the time from its Philadelphia headquarters for trains traversing hundreds of miles.
Inconsistencies made travelers miss their trains. More dangerously, operators running on different times caused train wrecks. One of the first timekeeping-related disasters happened in 1853 when a conductor allowed a passenger train to depart one minute outside of its timetable, resulting in a head-on collision in Valley Falls, R.I. that killed 14 people. With money and lives on the line, Langley pioneered a system for accurate timekeeping at the Observatory and capitalized on it.
One problem with using solar time has to do with our conception of a day being 24 hours long (originated in Ancient Egypt). In actuality, this is an average (mean solar time), as the length of a day varies slightly throughout the year due to the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun and the tilt of its axis. There’s also a discrepancy between sidereal time, or “star time,” and solar time: if a day is defined as one complete rotation of the Earth on its axis, its length is actually four minutes shorter than we think — 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds.
A way to resolve this, Langley saw, was to observe stars at their highest points in the sky throughout the day, providing points of comparison to the sun.
Pursuit of these “clock stars” had Observatory astronomers constantly camped out at the transit telescope in the comfy lounge chair. Tracking the stars, the Observatory converted sidereal time to solar time, and Langley sold the time as a subscription service, transmitting it by telegraph. For about $3,000 annually ($72,000 today), Langley’s time system made it possible to know precise local times by converting to “Allegheny Standard Time.” Railroad operators compared the difference in their longitude with that of the Observatory.
It marked the first instance of an observatory making significant profit from a paid time subscription service. The service’s first customers were Pittsburgh jewelers, who used it to accurately set watches and timepieces.
The Pennsylvania Railroad naturally followed suit. According to the Observatory’s telegraph display, in 1870, the company ran 2,500 miles of railways on Allegheny Standard Time, transmitted through 300 telegraph offices, and ultimately expanded to 8,000 miles.
By 1890, Langley’s time service had earned more than $60,000 (more than $2 million today), effectively funding the Observatory for decades and charting a course for the national standardization of time.
On Oct. 11, 1883, a group of railroad executives convened at the General Time Convention and unilaterally established four North American time zones. Despite opposition by many Americans that their lives should not be governed “by railroad time,” the new time zones were implemented at noon on Nov. 18, 1883. Crowds of people across the country gathered in front of clocktowers, train stations, and jewelry stores to watch clocks stop for up to half an hour to set the “new noon.” Federal oversight of standard time, including daylight savings, was enacted in 1918.
Part of Langley’s legacy was shaping the future of large-scale industrialization, the effects of which are explored in State of the Sky, an exhibition on view at the Mattress Factory.
“Time, a construct as constant as it is intangible, is a key component of this exhibition,” text from artist Luke Stettner and his collaborators reads. With an eye toward environmental activism, the exhibition examines how the change in timekeeping and its sale to railroads ultimately “wreaked havoc on the environment.” In turn, Stettner “pays homage to the individuals and organizations that have, and continue to, champion the health of our skies and communities.”
State of the Sky draws from Langley’s own notebooks, where he meticulously monitored Pittsburgh’s atmospheric conditions. Accounts hold that Langley focused his initial research on the brightness of the sun since it was one only of the celestial bodies visible through heavy smoke pollution. An assortment of documents including Langley’s notes, archival materials from Pitt, and government records are displayed against modern news clippings detailing the ongoing fight for air pollution standards.
The exhibition also notes that, in 1912, the Observatory building was relocated to its current site at the highest point in Pittsburgh, in part, “to escape the ‘smoke city’ and better see the stars.”
Today, though stepping into the Observatory feels like going back 150 years, it functions as a modern working laboratory with frequent invitations to the public. On a given night, Handron says, they might be hosting a lecture by astronomy experts, running an educational program for kids like the recent Moon Tree planting, showing around a church group or Scouts, or simply inviting tour-goers and Observatory Hill neighbors to come and gaze into a telescope.
“Langley had a long history of inviting people to come look at space with the telescopes. So the history goes all through the whole thing,” she tells City Paper. “We have the Observatory going back to its beginnings as ‘let’s look at the stars.’”
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2024.
