Why were time zones created?
So that the train companies could schedule their trains. Before that, each city and town had their own time, which made too much confusion for the trains. The first time zone in the world was established by British railway companies in 1847.
Going East on I-10,(Florida) What's the first city you'll hit in the Eastern time zone?
You are right, roughly half way between Oakdale and the capital. Interstate 10 spans the Apalachicola River just east of Exit 158 at the Jackson/Gadsden County line. The crossing marks the change from the Central to Eastern Time Zone for eastbound travelers. A rest area does lie just east of the span. Greensboro would be the closest city 13 or so miles into the Eastern time zone.
Who invented time zones?
The first adoption of a standard time was on December 1, 1847, in Great Britain by railway companies using GMT kept by portable chronometers. The first of these companies to adopt standard time was the Great Western Railway (GWR) in November 1840. This quickly became known as Railway Time. About August 23, 1852, time signals were first transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Even though 98% of Great Britain's public clocks were using GMT by 1855, it was not made Britain's legal time until August 2, 1880. Some old British clocks from this period have two minute hands—one for the local time, one for GMT.On November 2, 1868, the then-British colony of New Zealand officially adopted a standard time to be observed throughout the colony, and was perhaps the first country to do so. It was based on the longitude 172°30′ East of Greenwich, that is 11 hours 30 minutes ahead of GMT. This standard was known as New Zealand Mean Time.Charles F. Dowd proposed a system of one-hour standard time zones for American railroads about 1863, although he published nothing on the matter at that time and did not consult railroad officials until 1869. In 1870 he proposed four ideal time zones (having north–south borders), the first centered on Washington, D.C., but by 1872 the first was centered on the meridian 75° W of Greenwich, with geographic borders (for example, sections of the Appalachian Mountains). Dowd's system was never accepted by American railroads. Instead, U.S. and Canadian railroads implemented a version proposed by William F. Allen, the editor of the Traveler's Official Railway Guide.Lifted from Wikipedia.