Everyone kept their own noon
Published:
Until the 1840s every English town ran on local solar time. Bristol sat about ten minutes behind London and nobody minded, because nothing moved fast enough for it to matter.
Railways broke it. You can’t publish a timetable across towns that disagree about what time it is, so the railways picked one and ran on it.
Greenwich won because the railways said so. Parliament didn’t make it law until 1880.