International Meridian Conference
On 11 October 1883, a convention of railroad executives met in Chicago and agreed to the implementation of five time zones in North America, using as a basis Greenwich Mean Time. Before the invitations to the Washington conference were sent out on December 1, the joint efforts of Abbe, Fleming and William Frederick Allen, Secretary of the US railways' "General Time Convention" and Managing Editor of the "Travellers' Official Guide to the Railways", had brought the US railway companies to an agreement which led to standard railway time being introduced at noon on 18 November 1883 across the nation. Although this was not legally established until 1918, there was thus a strong sense of "fait accompli" that preceded the Washington conference, although setting local times was not part of the remit of the conference.
Mitch Daniels
One of the most controversial measures Daniels successfully pushed through was the state adoption of Daylight Saving Time, which Daniels argued would save the state money on energy costs. Although the state is in the Eastern Time Zone, Indiana's counties had adopted their own time zone practices, and in practice the state effectively observed two different times, and the central part of the state maintained a single time—Eastern Standard—year round. Interests for both EST and CST time zones had prevented the official adoption of daylight saving since the 1930s, and had led to decades of debate. Daniels pressed for the entire state to switch to Central Time, but the General Assembly could not come to terms. Ultimately after a long debate, they adopted Eastern Daylight Saving Time in April 2005, the measure passing by one vote, putting all but northwestern and southwestern Indiana on the same time for the first time.