Victorians

Through research I have found out that Victorians actually standarised time as it was in this era in Britain that the first use of steam trains came into play. The whole country was out of sync with each other with time so they needed to make sure that they synced everything together with timetables to make sure the service worked.

"When people began traveling by train, sometimes hundreds of miles in a day, the calculation of time became a serious problem. Operators of the new railroad lines realized that a new time plan was needed in order to offer a uniform train schedule for departures and arrivals.
Since every city was using a different time standard, there were over 300 local sun times to choose from. The railroad managers tried to address the problem by establishing 100 railroad time zones, but this was only a partial solution to the problem."

However it took a while for the service to actually work due to all of the time zones needing to change with caused a lot of confusion for the public.

"The fact remained that the different railroad lines were using time schedules that varied from each other and from the cities they passed through, causing considerable befuddlement. Where railroad lines using different time zones intersected with each other, or with cities using different time standards, travelers were especially confused.
During the mid-nineteenth century, people throughout the world had experimented with methods of standardizing their clocks. In 1830 the U.S. Naval Observatory was created to cooperate with Great Britain's Greenwich Observatory to determine time based on astronomical observations. Accurate sea navigation based on the calculation of latitude and longitude, depended on accurate timekeeping."

Website: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/nov18.html