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raised money for the department in large part by distributing standard time to cities and railroads. Up until then, correct time had only occasionally been sent from American observatories for public use. Clocks were manually wound in those days and time tended to be imprecise. Exact time had not been especially necessary. It was enough to know that at noon the sun was at its highest elevation for the day. That changed with the arrival of railroads, which made the lack of standard time dangerous. Trains ran by a published schedule, but scheduling

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