Before time zones were established in 1883, North America had over 144 local times.
Time zones can be confusing, but they beat the alternative. To wit: Before time zones were established in 1883, North America alone had at least 144 local times. Noon was when the sun reached its zenith, and in many places the only thing making time official was a town clock. This didn't affect many people’s day-to-day lives, as it often took several days to travel from one place to another, but confusion intensified once the expanding railroad system drastically cut travel times. Because time wasn’t standardized, coordinating schedules across multiple rail lines was nearly impossible, and travelers occasionally found themselves arriving at their final destination earlier than they’d departed. Sometimes, trains even collided.
Those problems more or less evaporated after November 18, 1883, when American railroads adopted the first four time zones (Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific) and all clocks in each zone were synchronized. The number of time zones rose to five with the passage of 1918’s Standard Time Act, which added Alaska. (The act also established the use of daylight saving time in the U.S., much to the chagrin of many.) Including its territories, the United States now has four more time zones — Chamorro (which is used in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands), Samoa, Hawaii-Aleutian, and Atlantic — for a total of nine.
If you've ever argued that time is no more than a human construct, you may enjoy learning about time zones at the North Pole. At once in “all of Earth's time zones and none of them,” it has no official time zone — and neither does its southern counterpart. That's because all 24 longitude lines (which mark the time zones) converge there, making them just about meaningless. Since both poles are generally uninhabited, there’s also no real need for an official time. Antarctica’s research stations get around this problem by observing either the local time of their home country or that of the nation closest to them. (There are no permanent research stations at the North Pole.)
