Short Stuff: Time Zones

of time zones in this modern age. It is very weird, um, And they're kind of new. And it makes sense that they're kind of new because before it was really difficult to move from place to place in any sort of quick manner. So it didn't really matter what time it was in some town a hundred miles away from you. Yeah, Like, there was no way of knowing really what time it was, and by the time you walked over there to ask, it was so much later than it had been when

you left it. Really, the whole thing just didn't matter. But once we started to invent ways of locomoting more quickly, um, the world got a lot smaller, And I really don't like that term. For some reason, I just feel like I need to confess this. The world got smaller, the world shrank. I don't know why it really bothers me, Okay, because right, well, you can make a flat circle smaller

and by the way, I am absolutely not flatter. What's funny is that you have to like specify that in this day and age, you know, so, um, as the world got smaller, um, then suddenly it did kind of matter what time it was in the town a hundred miles away, because you might have a connecting train you had to pick up there, and you needed to make sure that that train was coordinating with the train that you were getting there on so that you could reach

there by some designated time. And that didn't always happen at first, no, I mean it was a real problem. People were late for trains, they were missing their trains. That was uh. There were circumstances where trains would be close to colliding one to one another because of the schedules and the times. Yeah, I mean, if everyone isn't agreed on what time it is and you have an interconnected train system, that's that can be extraordinarily problematic. Yeah,

I mean, and this this was happening in Europe. In the US, it was a real mess because we had local time zones. And I don't mean regional, I mean like every city in the US. So we had three hundred time zones in the United States. Uh. And then eventually they said, all right, we need this is unwieldy. Let's whittle it down to one hundred time zones, right.

And the reason why there were so many is because up to this point, everybody basically set there or watch or their sun dial or what have you to noon when the sun was directly overhead. Everybody knew it was noon in your town. But that doesn't mean it's noon somewhere else. It means it's noon in your town. And

so everybody, every town basically had their own time zone, right. So, um, when they whittled it down to a hundred, that was a vast improvement, but it still wasn't quite where they needed it to be because there were still a lot of problems with it. And so a scientist his last name was Fleming, he was Scottish, and his first name was Sir Sandford. Well, the sir wasn't his first name. That was an honor honorific but the Sandford was his

first name, Sanford, Sir Sandford and sun fleming. Uh. And he missed a train in eighteen seventy six, as the legend goes, because of the timetable and the this you know, screwy time zone thing, and he said, I'm through. He got mad and he said, you know what I'm gonna do. I'm going to divide the world in time zones, which makes sense, spaced at one degree intervals all across the planet.

And everyone said, groundskeeper Willie, that's brilliant. Yeah that was you just made short stuff special officially because it was a rare chucked Scottish accent. I know it's the rarest, Yeah, it is the rarest. So that's pretty smart. Twenty four time zones makes a lot of sense. Um, that's how it is today. You would think that's not the case. As a matter of fact, I believe there's thirty nine time zones around the world. Yeah, that's what I saw.

Thirty nine time zones, not twenty four. And to to make the badness even more complete, um, some of these time zones are offset not by a single hour like it should be some people offset their time zones by thirty minutes or forty five minutes, which is just like just drop out of the world. Basically if you do that, you know, so it's it's it's what they call an s word show these days. But um, even that was still an improvement from that hundred or three hundred something

in the US. And in the United States, we've had four time zones Eastern, Um, Central Mountain, and Pacific for I guess since the nineteenth century. Actually, as a matter of fact, exactly in the nineteenth century, on November eight, eight three, those were officially instituted not by the country necessarily itself, but by the railroad companies who all agreed finally on a uniform um time where it was at

any given point in the country, that's right. And they actually when all the railroads chuck um set time on this one specific day, they all changed to noon when it reached noon standard time in their their time zone, which meant that each of those places had a noon twice in one day. So it's very famously called the day of two Noons. Amazing. I think so too. You want to take a break, let's do it, okay, Alright, so things are getting a little less unwieldy, are more wheeldy.

More we has that had a thing that's where I'm casting my lot. Can something be wheeldy? I guess if it can be unwieldy, surely it can be wheeldy too. All right, So things are getting better. And then we went off and invented planes, and then planes could get places even quicker, and that just compresses the you know, travel time even more. And then the Internet is invented, and all of a sudden, it's pretty much like everyone's

running on a seven culture all over the world. And some people in recent years have looked up and said, why do we have time zones anyway? Why can't we just all agree to set our clocks on the same time. Take a little bit of getting used to, but you'll all be okay once you wrap your head around the fact that a number is just some random shape that you designate for where the sun is in the sky. Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely true, and it is arbitrary and

totally artificial. But it's going to take a little while to not think like that if we follow these guys advice. If you asked me, yeah, we're talking specifically about a man named Hanka. I'd say Hanky Hanky. Yeah, let's say Hanka. It depends on where he's from. If you wanted to be wrong, you can say Honka. He's a John's Hopkins

University professor of physics. And there's another guy named Richard con Henry uh and they what they propose is just a universal time, like I said, where everyone in the world agrees on one thing, and that's to just set our clocks the same, which I am totally down for.

It does make sense. Um Honka and Heinry Um definitely have a really good idea here, which is we all set our clocks to UM Universal Time Coordinated UTC, which used to be called Greenwich Mean time, which basically says the prime meridian that goes through Greenwich, England is zero hours. It's also called Zulu time because Z for zero in UM air trucker or plane speak, UM is zulu, Z is zulu, I thot I think he means zed z depending on who you're talking to. That's why they all

just call it zulu. So because they couldn't agree on zero or zed right, right, But this is already happening. And you know, like the military has been doing this, Uh, financial traders do the US because it's just clearly the better way to go. It is. It is because if it's if it's say, um, it's nine o'clock at and on the prime meridian nine o'clock am, then it's it would be nine o'clock all over the world. The whole world is based on what time it is on the

prime meridian. But here's the thing, and this is why it's hard to wrap your head around this kind of thing. That means then that rather than it being nine o'clock eventually associated with the morning in your land, wherever you are, nine am might take on an entirely different meaning, just a completely different meaning, because that nine am might be at what's two am to you? Now, Yeah, you just gotta give up those things, man, give it up. Right.

We would have to totally decouple and it would be so difficult that I think, uh Hanka and hein right say um that it would take about a generation for us to get used to it. In basically, they're saying we have to just some of those of us alive today have to die off, and then the younger generation have to be raised like this for it not to be weird to eat breakfast at like PM or something like that, depending on where you are. Yeah, and I think I mean that's for a full like, hey, it's

a little weird for me to completely go away. I think inside a few years everyone would just be like, all right, that, you know whatever. I used to call this nine am, but now it's you know, twelve pm, right, um, And again, I mean, you know me, I've gone off before about I don't necessarily think it's arbitrary, but just the symbolic nature of a number is just you know, something man has slapped on. Time is an artificial human construct for sure, and clocks like keeping time is even

more artificial. But there's some like real upsides to this, to this idea, it's all upside so well, I think the getting used to it part would be really weird. Although it could be like such a distraction for the entire world that we might just forget about all this the bs quagmire. A lot of us find ourselves and just be like this is cool. You know, who knows

but them. Some of the upsides are that if you live on the western edge of a time zone, you got to keep up with the eastern edge, and you typically suffer from sleep deprivation chronically as a result of living on the western edge of the time zone. That would be gone, I think solely for business purposes and travel purposes. The benefits are just so outrageously strong that it just doesn't make any sense to do anything otherwise. So can you explain something to me? How do how

does it get rid of something like jet lag? If we're still traveling to some other part of the world and the sun is still up or it's not up and it should be for our our biological clocks. How does having the time be the same help that? Do you understand that? I don't think it does at all? Okay, well then makes sense. Yeah, I mean I think you would just you would still be going to bed super early if you traveled to l A from the east coast. Uh,

it would just whatever symbol on your watch would be different. Yeah. Um, but just booking travel, booking conference calls, like anything would be a nice have to be like, well, this is ten o'clock your time and nine o'clock my time. Just it's just ten o'clock, right, It's just ten o'clock means

different things. To different people. Yes, exactly, you'd have to there would be no more shootouts at high noon or you know, we party till two in the morning, we party till seven at night, right exactly all around the world on where you are. Uh, it would it would totally take some getting used to. But I just think it's like, why not explore this well, because it would

it would be a significant undertaking. But yeah, it could be kind yeah, to get the whole world to throw away all this stuff and just start over on UTC. It would be It would take some we can't even agree on the metric system for PiZZ says good point, But I agree with you. I think it's neat and interesting and I think it could probably over time be very beneficial or or the rest of the world would do it. In the United States wouldn't, right, right, which

is kind of sort of what's going on. I mean, Europe's on its twenty four o'clock right, Uh, yeah, I believe so, and I know the military in the United States, so it is kind of like metric, like we do kind of secretly do metric on the download here or there. So, um, you got anything else or got anything else? Okay, Well, If you want to know more about this, go find out about it yourself, because your stuff is done. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How

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