[colefichter]

Every town used to have their own local time based on the sun being at zenith at local noon. For example, a place like Oxford would be a few minutes behind London.

With the advent of railways, it became necessary to standardize things a bit. You can imagine the difficulty if each town a train stopped in had its own timezone!

There's an interesting podcast from BBC that covers this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/u6Qnc25jQ5OI...