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Sandford Fleming just wanted everyone to agree on what time it is

  

Category:  Health, Science & Technology

Via:  bob-nelson  •  7 years ago  •  17 comments

Sandford Fleming just wanted everyone to agree on what time it is

Fleming is the reason we have time zones

Sandford_Fleming__empire_builder__1915___14573100639_.0.jpg

Wikimedia Commons

Sandford Fleming wanted to make the world a less chaotic place, and for everyone to agree on one thing: what time it was. He did it by convincing countries around the world to adopt Greenwich Mean Time as its universal standard and to split up into 24 time zones. Today he would have been 190 years old, and Google is marking the occasion with a Google Doodle in his honor.

Fleming understood technology was making the world more interconnected

In the 1870s, Fleming was the chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and he understood that the completion of the transcontinental railway in the United States, and burgeoning efforts to do the same in Canada, meant the world had become a smaller, more interconnected place.

It wasn’t just the railroad. The telegraph, too, was making it possible to communicate across the ocean in an instant. “The application of science to the means of locomotion and to the instantaneous transmission of thought and speech have gradually contracted space and annihilated distance,” Fleming wrote .

But as the world was becoming more connected, time was still set locally. Noon in a city or town was defined by the sun — which meant cities as close as New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore could all have different ideas about what time it was.

In a world where a train could leave one city and arrive in another within hours, that wouldn’t do. Fleming illustrated the havoc in his 1876 book Terrestrial Time (emphasis mine):

To illustrate the points of difficulty, let us first take the case of a traveller in North America.

He lands, let us say, at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and starts on a railway journey through the eastern portions of Canada. His route is over the Intercolonial and Grand Trunk Lines. He stops at St. John, Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto.

At the beginning of the journey he sets his watch by Halifax time. As he reaches each place in succession, he finds a considerable variation in the clocks by which the trains are run, and he discovers that at no two places is the same time used.

Between Halifax and Toronto he finds the railways employing no less than five different standards of time. If the traveller remained at any one of the cities referred to he would be obliged to alter his watch in order to avoid much inconvenience, and, perhaps, not a few disappointments and annoyances to himself and others.

If, however, he should not alter his watch, he would discover, on reaching Toronto, that it was an hour and five minutes faster than the clocks and watches in that city.

Chaos!

Fleming foresaw that the problem was only going to get worse. “In a few years, scores of populous towns and cities will spring up in the now uninhabited territories between the two oceans,” he wrote. The country couldn’t function with dozens of cities all ticking to their own clocks.

He first formally proposed a universal time in Canada in 1879. That led to the International Meridian Conference in 1884 where the matter was settled: The world would be divided into 24 time zones, starting with the time in Greenwich, England, and adding one hour every 15 degrees of longitude.

(Greenwich was selected as the prime meridian because it was already in popular use. Also, if you traced it around the globe, the other side of it would land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The “dateline,” where one day turned into another, could be set there.)

 

An illustration of time zones in Terrestrial Time .

Should time zones now be eliminated too?

The individual time zones meant that cities could still keep noon as more or less midday. But Fleming’s real dream was that everyone would set a watch by Universal Time.

“His main desire was to have instituted a uniform time standard for the whole world ... which he called Terrestrial, Cosmopolitan or Cosmic Time,” the Atlas of Alberta Railways explains . He imagined that people would wear watches with two dials “that would indicate the Cosmopolitan time in letters and the local time in Roman numerals.”

That didn’t catch on.

But even today there’s still a desire to realize Fleming’s dream, and get rid of the time zones completely. Here at Vox, Matt Yglesias has made the case to have everyone run on Universal Time:

If the whole world used a single GMT-based time, schedules would still vary. In general most people would sleep when it's dark out and work when it's light out. So at 23:00, most of London would be at home or in bed and most of Los Angeles would be at the office. But of course London's bartenders would probably be at work while some shift workers in LA would be grabbing a nap. The difference from today is that if you were putting together a London-LA conference call at 21:00 there'd be only one possible interpretation of the proposal. A flight that leaves New York at 14:00 and lands in Paris at 20:00 is a six-hour flight, with no need to keep track of time zones. If your appointment is in El Paso at 11:30, you don't need to remember that it's in a different time zone than the rest of Texas.

Not to mention a lot of the time zones are oddly drawn to avoid states, countries, and cities to avoiding having the confusion of having two time zones within their borders. Getting rid of all of them would simplify the map.

Fleming’s legacy lives on

Synchronization would become more important than Fleming could imagine in his wildest dreams. Today it’s essential for GPS satellites to keep in precise sync and be accurate to a degree that accounts for the time-warping properties of general relativity. And global stock markets couldn’t run if computers couldn’t agree on when a transaction occurred.

Sanford knew the world would only grow more interconnected with technology. And he knew that in this strange future, the more we could agree upon, the better.

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Original article by Brian Resnick in Vox


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Bob Nelson
Professor Guide
link   seeder  Bob Nelson    7 years ago

I travel quite a bit. I talk to people who are a long way away.

Time zones are a pain in the patooty.

 
 
 
PJ
Masters Quiet
link   PJ  replied to  Bob Nelson   7 years ago

I agree.  I have more trouble adjusting to the timezone when I travel to Europe than when I return to the US but I don't sleep well anyhow and worse when I travel.   

 
 
 
Dowser
Sophomore Quiet
link   Dowser    7 years ago

It used to drive me nuts to have meetings in Indianapolis.  We're in Eastern Time Zone, here in Louisville, which goes to Daylight Savings Time 1/2 of the year-- so 1/2 of the year, we're on the same time as Indianapolis and 1/2 of the year, we're an hour ahead, because much of Indiana doesn't go to DST.  It's confusing as hell for those little towns along the Ohio River, where the time changes, and the little towns across the river, where the time doesn't change...  Many of those little towns are connected by bridges, so you can lose or gain an hour just by crossing the river.  It's sort of a regular occurrence here to arrive for a specific event an hour late, or an hour early...  Like the time in high school, when we got to Tell City, IN, (on the river) and hour late for the half-time show we were supposed to march in.  At least I'm not the only one that messes it up!  

Note:  I always thought the time zones had something to do with the longitudinal lines...  Likely not.  I seem to remember that from my college geography class, 40+ years ago...

 
 
 
Bob Nelson
Professor Guide
link   seeder  Bob Nelson  replied to  Dowser   7 years ago

There's only one time zone time zone for the EU.

Almost. There's the UK, which is different, as usual. Well... when Brexit finally occurs, that will take care of that!

Almost.

Except Portugal.

and Ireland...

     crazy

 
 
 
Dowser
Sophomore Quiet
link   Dowser  replied to  Bob Nelson   7 years ago

It's way too confusing!!!  But, I don't know that any major change will make any less confusing.  I guess we could all get used to a Universal Time, but it would be hard!

 
 
 
Bob Nelson
Professor Guide
link   seeder  Bob Nelson    7 years ago

I'd like to be able to say to someone, "I'll call you at 14:30"... and not have to worry whether they / I will add / subtract the right number of hours.

 

 
 
 
Cerenkov
Professor Silent
link   Cerenkov  replied to  Bob Nelson   7 years ago

"I'll call you at 1400 EST." That's how we do it in my company since we have people on both coasts. 

 
 
 
Bob Nelson
Professor Guide
link   seeder  Bob Nelson  replied to  Cerenkov   7 years ago

Yes. But that means that anyone not on the east coast must calculate. If everyone was on Universal Time, it would be 1900 for everyone, regardless of where they may be.

 
 
 
Kavika
Professor Principal
link   Kavika     7 years ago

I used to fly between the US and Australia quite often. It was always interesting when I would take the 1pm flight out of Sydney on Sunday and arrive in LA at 10am Sunday morning.

Talk about back to the future.

 
 
 
Bob Nelson
Professor Guide
link   seeder  Bob Nelson  replied to  Kavika   7 years ago

Can you imagine living near the dateline? crazy

 
 
 
Kavika
Professor Principal
link   Kavika   replied to  Bob Nelson   7 years ago

I lived in Samoa for a while and it was on the date line. The next island over was Tonga, interesting when I had to go to Tonga on business...A day different.

 
 
 
Bob Nelson
Professor Guide
link   seeder  Bob Nelson  replied to  Kavika   7 years ago

That's cool!   applause

 
 
 
Aeonpax
Freshman Silent
link   Aeonpax    7 years ago

I got acclimated to time zones by listening to shortwave radio. One of these days, I want to get an Amateur Radio license (Ham radio).

 
 
 
Bob Nelson
Professor Guide
link   seeder  Bob Nelson  replied to  Aeonpax   7 years ago

I had an uncle who was a ham operator for fifty years. He was up at all hours, talking to people on the other side of the world... when the ozone layer was bouncing just right...

 
 
 
Aeonpax
Freshman Silent
link   Aeonpax  replied to  Bob Nelson   7 years ago

Actually, it's the ionosphere short wave and amateur radio operators bounce their signals off of.

 
 
 
Bob Nelson
Professor Guide
link   seeder  Bob Nelson  replied to  Aeonpax   7 years ago

Details, details! 

If I want my radio waves to bounce off the ozone layer, then they'll damned well bounce off the ozone layer! 

peace

 
 
 
Aeonpax
Freshman Silent
link   Aeonpax  replied to  Bob Nelson   7 years ago

I can't argue with that.

 

 
 

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