Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Time Zone Oddities

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

Before we created time zones, every village, town, and city had their own local time. You’d set the town’s clock according to when the sun was at its highest point each day, and everything was fine. Eventually, life got faster. Trains began moving between towns and small differences in time began to cause problems. This eventually led to the creation of time zones, so we could get everyone in the world on the same page as far as what time it is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we created time zones, every village, town, and city had their own local time. You'd set the town's clock according to when the sun was at its highest point each day, and everything was fine. Eventually life got faster. Trains began moving between towns, and small differences in time began to cause problems. This eventually led to the creation of time zones, so we could get everyone in the world on the same page as far as what time it is. Of course, we can't have nice things, and a simple thing like time zones became really complicated.

Learn just how complicated things have become on this. episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR.

This episode is brought to you by the Travel Photography Academy. Have you ever been on a trip and wondered why your photos don't turn out like the images you see in travel magazines? If you're going to spend thousands of dollars on a trip and hundreds to thousands of dollars on a camera, you owe it to yourself to get the highest quality images from your trip. That's why I created the Travel Photography Academy. I set out to travel around the world in 2007 with an expensive camera, and I had no idea how to use it. As I traveled around the world, I taught myself the art of travel photography,

eventually mastering it to a point where I was named Travel Photographer of the Year 3,000, times in North America. The Travel Photography Academy is an online course that teaches you everything you need to know to master your camera and to take better photos on your next trip. To improve your photography and to get better images on your next trip, visit Travel Photographyacademy.com or click in the link in the show notes. For most of human history, we didn't have time zones, nor did we have need for time zones. The distances between places and the speed people could travel meant that small differences in time between communities really didn't matter. So each community could have their own time based on solar noon, and no one was any of the wiser.

To give an example, the time difference between London and Bath, England, was about 10 minutes. They were located about 100 miles apart from each other, and it took several days to travel from one to the other. The difference in 10 minutes didn't really matter, considering that accurate personal watches weren't even a thing until the 19th century. After several days of travel, you couldn't tell the difference between 10 minutes. All of this changed with the advent of railroads. They allowed you to travel between two communities much faster than was previously possible, and those small differences between times and communities suddenly began to become problematic. If you said a train was going to arrive at, say, 715, was at 7.15 in the city where it was leaving,

or 715 in the city where it was arriving, because even a difference of five minutes could mean the difference between someone missing or making the train. railroads eventually solve this problem by creating their own standard time for each railroad. This was known as railway time. The first railway to do this was the Great Western Railway in England in 1840. This solved the problem of getting all of the trains in the same company working together, but it didn't solve the problem of different train companies working together. Each company would have its own time, which was often determined by what the solar noon was at the company headquarters. If you wanted to take different trains run by different railways,

you needed to know what the time was for each company. This led to railway stations often keeping multiple clocks for each company, which was not an elegant solution. What was needed was a coordinated standard time for everyone. In Britain, this was relatively easy, given the size of the country and the fact that it runs mostly north-south. In 1852, the Greenwich Observatory began sending out signals via telegraph, which allowed the entire country to start using the same time, even though this unified time wasn't codified

into British law until 1880. By the way, the first country to legally have a unified time zone was New Zealand, which adopted a single time zone in 1868. In the United States, it was a bit more problematic. The country was big, and by the time railroads started to cross the continent in the 1860s, the issue of coordinating time became a real problem. The first time zone system adopted in North America was proposed by William F. Allen, who was the editor of the Traveler's Official Railway Guide. American and Canadian Railroads adopted the system on November 18, 1883, but it had several problems, not the least of which was that the borders of the time zones ran through major cities and often right through the railway stations.

Splitting up cities into different time zones just wasn't going to work in the long run. While the borders of the zones were eventually moved to rural areas and adjusted, the five time zones it created were the basic time zones what we use today. Atlantic, then called intercolonial, eastern, central, mountain, and Pacific. By 1884, the vast majority of the cities in both the U.S. and Canada were using the time zone system, even though it didn't become law in the U.S. until 1918. The father of worldwide time zones is Canadian Sir Stanford Fleming, who proposed a global time zone system in 1879.

By 1900, most of the places in the world had adopted some sort of standard time zone offset from Greenwich Mean time by an even number of hours. However, there is no global body that mandates time zones. Every country and many regions still determine their own local time. This leads to some very big exceptions to the clean one hour per 15 degrees of longitude that you would expect. And let's start with an obvious one. Spain.

If you look at a time zone map, it is pretty obvious that Spain is in the wrong time zone. Spain is directly south of the UK and the prime meridian runs directly through it. But Spain is in the same time zone as Germany and Poland. The result is that sunrise and sunset are both really late. late in Spain. The Spanish tradition of having dinner very late comes from being in the wrong time zone. The reason why Spain's clocks are the way they are is due to Generissimo Francisco Franco, who in a show of unity with Nazi Germany in 1940, move their clocks ahead one hour so they were on the same time. After the war was over and well after Franco died, Spain just never set their

clocks back. There has been talk of changing time zones, but so far nothing has been done in Spain. China is a huge country, but the entire country is a single time zone centered around Beijing. Because everyone is on the same clock, you have massive differences in when the sun rises and sets. On the winter solstice, the sun will rise in the city of Fuyang, China's easternmost city at 6.51 a.m. However, the sun will not rise until 10.13 a.m. in Kasi, the western most city in China. That's almost a three-and-a-half-hour difference. During the summer solstice, sunrise and Fou Yan rises at 301 a.m. If you cross the border from China to Afghanistan, there is a three-and-a-half-hour time change,

the largest for any border crossing in the world. On the other end of the spectrum, Russia has 11 time zones with a full 10-hour difference between the far east and the far west. They tried collapsing them into just nine time zones to make things simpler, but they reverted back to 11 time zones after people complained. One of the things that makes time zones really complicated is daylight savings time. This is something that is done mostly in places that are in extreme northern or southern latitudes. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the concept.

You jump ahead an hour in the spring and fall back one hour in the fall. Except, of course, there are places that make life difficult. Like I said before, we can't have nice things. Arizona doesn't observe daylight savings, so during daylight savings, they're in the same time zone as Los Angeles, and in the winter they're in the same time zone as Denver. except that the Navajo Nation, which takes up about a quarter of the state, does observe daylight savings. Except that the Hopi Nation, which is totally surrounded by the Navajo Nation, doesn't observe daylight savings. Got that?

Up in Canada, Saskatchewan doesn't observe daylight savings at all, and in the Yukon Territory, they don't observe standard time. They jumped ahead an hour in March 2020, and they're no longer going to jump back. Down in Australia, they normally have three time zones, except that the southernmost states of South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and New South Wales all observed daylight savings, but Queensland, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia do not, meaning they go from three to five time zones every year. Another thing to add to the confusion is the international date line. In theory, the international date line is at 180 degrees longitude.

However, this runs right through some countries, which means that the line zigzags to keep countries on the same date. recently the country of Samoa switched which side of the international date line they were on. In 2011, Samoa went from December 29th, directly to December 31st, totally skipping December 30th because they moved which side of the date line they were on. They had more business and cultural connections with New Zealand and other countries on that side of the line, so they decided to switch to make things easier. Of course, they're now on a totally different day as nearby American Samoa, but I will leave that for another episode.

And on a personal note, I once missed a flight from Samoa to Tonga back in 2007 because I misread my ticket because of the date change. So I fully support Samoa in this effort. The nation of Kiribati was spread out across the international date line. In 1994, they decided to lump the whole country together on one side of the international date line. However, that meant the easternmost parts would have to be in their own time zone one hour before the rest of the country. This new time zone, formerly east of the international date line, is the first part of the world to welcome in every day. It also means that for one hour every day, there are three calendar days on the earth. For example, when it's 1201 a.m. on the third of the month in eastern Kiribati, it's 11.01 p.m. on the second of the month in Western Kiribati.

And 11.01 p.m. on the first of the month in Hawaii. Are you totally confused yet? Because I haven't even gotten to my biggest pet peeve. Fractional hour time zones. For the life of me, I do not understand why these exist, but they do. The island of Newfoundland is one half hour ahead of Atlantic time in Canada. Likewise, South Australia and the Northern Territory are a half hour behind the eastern states of Australia, but one and a half hours ahead of Western Australia. To make it even more confusing, The small town of Ukula in Western Australia is on the border of South Australia and has their own little time zone where they split the difference between Perth and Adelaide and are offset by 45 minutes from each. India, Sri Lanka, Iran, Afghanistan are also in half-hour time zones.

However, the prize has to be handed to Nepal, which has its own special time zone, which is plus five hours and 45 minutes from GMT. They couldn't even be like their neighbors with. half-hour time zones. Thankfully, what was a logistical nightmare for the world traveler is now just a matter of flicking a switch on your smartphone, and you'd never have to worry about time zones again. Unless you're trying to coordinate a Zoom call with someone on the other side of the world, in which case, best of luck. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAlla.

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