[T-Bone Texan]

You posit a fascinating theory.

[Alberta's Child]

That was something that struck me one day after driving across a full time zone in the U.S. from Boston to Chicago.

The other thing I noticed (on a trip across Canada) was that the time zones in the U.S. and Canada are organized so that all of the Great Lakes are in the Eastern Time Zone. This makes the Eastern Time Zone extend west of some parts of the Central Time Zone in the Midwest.