Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday at 2 a.m.

Many people see DST as a pain. Some people apparently even see time zones as too much work. Recall the advocacy of “universal time,” which would base all clocks around the world on Greenwich Mean Time, regardless of what the sun tells you. We Central Time Zone residents would work not from 8 to 5, but from 14:00 to 22:00 (because eliminating time zones would also eliminate DST).

For those who prefer the old days, Slate should disabuse you of that notion:

Between the advent of railway travel and telegraphic communication in the middle of the 19th century and the establishment of standardized time zones in the 1880s, newly mobile people trying to do business from a distance were confounded by a wide array of local times. Charts like this one, which were intended to help, now show us how utterly confusing everything was.

The chart, which is from the 1874 version of Johnson’s New Illustrated Family Atlas (published in New York), uses Washington, D.C., as its standard. The clocks radiating outward are arranged in concentric circles, with Latin American cities on the interior, large European and Asian cities next, and American and Canadian cities and towns occupying the outer rings.

Because locations established time based on local readings of the sun and the phases of the moon, even towns as close together as Galveston and Austin, Texas, (located at about the 8 o’clock location on this chart) ran an annoying 11 minutes apart.

Look on the left of this calendar, and you’ll notice that if it’s noon in Washington, it’s 10:53 a.m. in Des Moines, 10:55 a.m. in St. Paul, 11:02 a.m. in Iowa City and Quincy, Ill., 11:08 a.m. in St. Louis, 11:09 a.m. in Springfield, Ill., 11:10 a.m. in Madison, 11:12 a.m. in Janesville, 11:16 a.m. in Milwaukee, and 11:17 a.m. in Chicago.