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Chicago Made a River Run Backwards and Got Away With It

By the end of the 1800s, Chicago had a problem: its sewage flowed into the Chicago River, the Chicago River flowed into Lake Michigan, and Lake Michigan was the city's drinking water. The city considered its options and concluded that the cleanest solution was to reverse the river.

At dawn on 2 January 1900, a small group of officials broke the final dam. It was done quietly and early, with only a few friendly reporters present, because Missouri was in the middle of suing to stop it and nobody wanted a judge finding out that the job was already finished.

The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court — the first pollution case it ever heard. Chicago won. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted that the Mississippi was indeed foul, but that Chicago could hardly be blamed for all of it, given how many closer cities were doing exactly the same thing.

The river has been running the wrong way for a hundred and twenty-six years.

As a bonus: the famous green dye started as sewage detection. City workers were using dye to trace illegal discharges into the river. In 1962 someone tipped in a hundred pounds of it, the river stayed emerald for a week, and a municipal leak-detection technique became an annual civic celebration.

The clock: Chicago is also where time zones happened.

Before 1883, North America ran on roughly three hundred separate local times, each town setting noon by its own sun. Workable for farming, catastrophic for railways. In October 1883, the railroads met at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago and simply imposed four time zones on an entire continent, without asking a single government.

The switch came on 18 November. The Chicago Tribune's reporter watched the depot clock stop at noon, and be restarted nine minutes and thirty-two seconds later — at noon again. The papers called it the day of two noons.

The hotel is gone. The building on its site is now called the Central Standard Building.

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