A Brief History of the Railroad Watch, and the Four Minutes That Created It
There is a particular kind of silence that follows a railway disaster, and in the spring of 1891, that silence settled over a stretch of single track near Kipton, Ohio. Two trains of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway had been running toward each other on the same line — not through recklessness, but through the quiet, almost invisible failure of a single pocket watch. The engineer of the Toledo Express believed he had time. His watch told him so. What it did not tell him was that it had quietly lost four minutes somewhere over the preceding days — an error too small to notice, and large enough to kill. When his train failed to yield the track,...