Learn English – Be on the ball idiom

RAILROAD WATCHES at the end of the 19th Century and well into the first half of the 20th Century were depended on to run trains on time. In the late 1890s there was a very bad train wreck which took place because a railroad conductor's pocket watch was off-time by more than eight minutes; based on what he BELIEVED was the correct time, the conductor gave the go-ahead to his train's locomotive engineer to proceed along a stretch of single track, relying on the schedule that showed that no trains would be traveling in the opposite direction along that same stretch of single track at that time. As a result of this conductor's inaccurate watch, his train collided head-on with another train traveling in the opposite direction, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries.

After this fatal wreck, railroad timekeeping, dependent on the precision, accuracy and reliability of railroad pocket watches, had to be raised to a much higher standard, wherein it became mandatory that ALL railroad watches in the United States had to be regularly inspected for accuracy and reliability, and removed from service for repair when found to be faulty.

The person put in charge of establishing and enforcing these new rules and setting the new higher minimum standards a railroad pocket watch had to meet in order to qualify as such, was a man by the name of Webb C. Ball, of Cleveland, Ohio, who was at the time the general time inspector for over 125,000 miles of railroad in the U.S.A., Canada and Mexico.

The American watch manufacturers Elgin, Hamilton, Waltham and others were therefore mandated to raise their standards for accurate time-keeping to meet Ball's new requirements. Some railroad watches were manufactured and sold under Webb C. Ball's own name, and Ball's 23-jewel railroad pocket watches have engraved on their dial faces, "BALL - OFFICIAL STANDARD - CLEVELAND." Thus it came to be that the phrase, "to be on the BALL," in railroaders' lexicon, meant that "YOUR TRAIN IS RUNNING ON TIME."

This story of railroad time-keeping adds yet another curious dimension to the many equally relevant sports- and maritime-related concepts of what it means "to be on the ball."