Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vog obam here. If you travel or used to, you know how much of an inconvenience it is to have to remember to adjust your watch and the clock on your laptop to reflect the local time at your destination, and then remember to switch it
back when you return. Or maybe you've missed an appointment for a telephone conference with somebody in a distant city because you've forgot that nine am in Chicago is seven am in Los Angeles and ten am in New York. Either way, time zones, which are supposed to keep our clocks consistent with solar time wherever we are on the planet, can really be a pain when you're traveling across multiple time zones or communicating with someone who's in a distant place.
It's strange to think that time zones were invented as a way of reducing confusion rather than causing it. And since solar time varies as you move even a short distance from one spot to another across the planet, for most of human history, the time of a varied everywhere. We spoke with Steve Hankey, a professor of applied economics,
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He explained time was only measured by placement of the sun, so the sun dial dictated what time it was, so noon in London, for example, came ten minutes earlier than noon and Bristol, which is a hundred and twenty miles or a little
under two hundred kilometers to the west. Even after people started using mechanical clocks in Europe at the thirteen hundreds, the inconsistencies persisted, but confusion about the exact time wasn't a huge problem until the eighteen hundreds, when railroad trains started making it possible to quickly travel from one place to the next. All of a sudden, Hanky said people were missing trains and you began to have near misses and train collisions occurring. In the US, every city had
a different time standard. You had three hundred local time zones in the US. The railroads eventually condensed it down to a hundred. Finally, a Scottish born engineer, Sir Sanford Fleming, ms to train in Ireland in eighteen seventy six due to a mistake in a printed timetable, and he decided to fix things. Fleming devised a system in which the world was divided into twenty four time zones spaced at
roughly fifteen degree intervals across the planet. Eventually the world adopted Fleming system, in which time was based not on the local solar day, but upon how many time zones separated a location from the Royal Greenwich Observatory in the UK, where Greenwich Meantime or GMT, was determined by the average time of day when the sun passed over the prime meridian at Greenwich. Most people already used c charts which designated Greenwich as the prime meridian or longitude zero degrees.
This is the line that divides the eastern and western hemispheres. On November three, which became known as the Day of two Noons, railroads in North America converted to a system of just four time zones, Eastern time, Central time, Mountain time, and Pacific time. Many cities passed ordinances adopting the system as well, and eventually it became the standard across the US. Using GMT as a starting point forestalled any competition between different U S cities for the honor of being the
prime meridian. But even with fewer time variations, time confusion again arose as a problem in the twentieth century. The advent of air travel compressed distances even more, and the rise of the Internet and mobile devices enabled instantaneous communication between people all over the planet and gave us the seven culture, in which we're tightly interconnected to events in distant places. That's why a few years ago Hanky and his colleague Richard con Henry, JOHNS Hopkins University professor of
physics and Astronomy, proposed an even simpler solution. They want to do away with time zones completely and put the entire world on Universal Time or UTC, under their system. When it's nine clock in one place, it's nine o'clock everywhere on the planet, even if it's morning in one
place and evening in another. In addition to making it easier to adjust to travel, having one time across the planet would make it easier for people who need to, say, set up conference calls with groups of individuals scattered from Montana to Germany, which Hanky, who's the supervisory board chairman of a Dutch company, sometimes has to do. Henry said
via email. Endless confusion would be gone forever. Life will be simpler, abolishing time zones might also eliminate the negative health effects from sleep deprivation that affect people who live on the western edge of time zones, which is totally a thing. Since Hanky and Henry proposed abolishing time zones in others have supported the idea as well, and to a certain extent, a switch to universal time already has
taken place. Pilots and air traffic controllers in the US, for example, rely on Universal time, or Zulu time as they call it. Financial traders who's dealings sometimes cross borders as well as time zones, stamp transactions in Universal time as well to make sure that the pricing is correct, and the Internet essentially runs on universal time. Some might wonder if a switch to universal time would alter the rhythm of people's daily schedules, but Hanky doesn't think so.
He said, people say, oh, if we went to universal time, that would mean would be opening businesses when it's dark outside. No, your business would go like it does now with the sun in New York or Baltimore. If you open normally at nine am, that would be four or two pm on your watch. It might take some getting used to, but Hanky thinks that within a generation children who grew up with universal time would no longer associate, say, seven am with breakfast time or nine am with starting work,
and the switch is not unheard of. Henry said China currently has this problem and that it has one time zone for a huge swath of East West real estate, but it's totally cured by having local decisions as to opening closing times for businesses and so on that would obviously be essential for a worldwide system. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kaiger and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and months of other timely topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com. Brain Stuff is production
of I Heart Radio or more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.