Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vog obam here. If you travel
Speaker 1: or used to, you know how much of an inconvenience
Speaker 1: it is to have to remember to adjust your watch
Speaker 1: and the clock on your laptop to reflect the local
Speaker 1: time at your destination, and then remember to switch it
Speaker 1: back when you return. Or maybe you've missed an appointment
Speaker 1: for a telephone conference with somebody in a distant city
Speaker 1: because you've forgot that nine am in Chicago is seven
Speaker 1: am in Los Angeles and ten am in New York.
Speaker 1: Either way, time zones, which are supposed to keep our
Speaker 1: clocks consistent with solar time wherever we are on the planet,
Speaker 1: can really be a pain when you're traveling across multiple
Speaker 1: time zones or communicating with someone who's in a distant place.
Speaker 1: It's strange to think that time zones were invented as
Speaker 1: a way of reducing confusion rather than causing it. And
Speaker 1: since solar time varies as you move even a short
Speaker 1: distance from one spot to another across the planet, for
Speaker 1: most of human history, the time of a varied everywhere.
Speaker 1: We spoke with Steve Hankey, a professor of applied economics,
Speaker 1: at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He explained time was
Speaker 1: only measured by placement of the sun, so the sun
Speaker 1: dial dictated what time it was, so noon in London,
Speaker 1: for example, came ten minutes earlier than noon and Bristol,
Speaker 1: which is a hundred and twenty miles or a little
Speaker 1: under two hundred kilometers to the west. Even after people
Speaker 1: started using mechanical clocks in Europe at the thirteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: the inconsistencies persisted, but confusion about the exact time wasn't
Speaker 1: a huge problem until the eighteen hundreds, when railroad trains
Speaker 1: started making it possible to quickly travel from one place
Speaker 1: to the next. All of a sudden, Hanky said people
Speaker 1: were missing trains and you began to have near misses
Speaker 1: and train collisions occurring. In the US, every city had
Speaker 1: a different time standard. You had three hundred local time
Speaker 1: zones in the US. The railroads eventually condensed it down
Speaker 1: to a hundred. Finally, a Scottish born engineer, Sir Sanford Fleming,
Speaker 1: ms to train in Ireland in eighteen seventy six due
Speaker 1: to a mistake in a printed timetable, and he decided
Speaker 1: to fix things. Fleming devised a system in which the
Speaker 1: world was divided into twenty four time zones spaced at
Speaker 1: roughly fifteen degree intervals across the planet. Eventually the world
Speaker 1: adopted Fleming system, in which time was based not on
Speaker 1: the local solar day, but upon how many time zones
Speaker 1: separated a location from the Royal Greenwich Observatory in the UK,
Speaker 1: where Greenwich Meantime or GMT, was determined by the average
Speaker 1: time of day when the sun passed over the prime
Speaker 1: meridian at Greenwich. Most people already used c charts which
Speaker 1: designated Greenwich as the prime meridian or longitude zero degrees.
Speaker 1: This is the line that divides the eastern and western hemispheres.
Speaker 1: On November three, which became known as the Day of
Speaker 1: two Noons, railroads in North America converted to a system
Speaker 1: of just four time zones, Eastern time, Central time, Mountain time,
Speaker 1: and Pacific time. Many cities passed ordinances adopting the system
Speaker 1: as well, and eventually it became the standard across the US.
Speaker 1: Using GMT as a starting point forestalled any competition between
Speaker 1: different U S cities for the honor of being the
Speaker 1: prime meridian. But even with fewer time variations, time confusion
Speaker 1: again arose as a problem in the twentieth century. The
Speaker 1: advent of air travel compressed distances even more, and the
Speaker 1: rise of the Internet and mobile devices enabled instantaneous communication
Speaker 1: between people all over the planet and gave us the
Speaker 1: seven culture, in which we're tightly interconnected to events in
Speaker 1: distant places. That's why a few years ago Hanky and
Speaker 1: his colleague Richard con Henry, JOHNS Hopkins University professor of
Speaker 1: physics and Astronomy, proposed an even simpler solution. They want
Speaker 1: to do away with time zones completely and put the
Speaker 1: entire world on Universal Time or UTC, under their system.
Speaker 1: When it's nine clock in one place, it's nine o'clock
Speaker 1: everywhere on the planet, even if it's morning in one
Speaker 1: place and evening in another. In addition to making it
Speaker 1: easier to adjust to travel, having one time across the
Speaker 1: planet would make it easier for people who need to, say,
Speaker 1: set up conference calls with groups of individuals scattered from
Speaker 1: Montana to Germany, which Hanky, who's the supervisory board chairman
Speaker 1: of a Dutch company, sometimes has to do. Henry said
Speaker 1: via email. Endless confusion would be gone forever. Life will
Speaker 1: be simpler, abolishing time zones might also eliminate the negative
Speaker 1: health effects from sleep deprivation that affect people who live
Speaker 1: on the western edge of time zones, which is totally
Speaker 1: a thing. Since Hanky and Henry proposed abolishing time zones
Speaker 1: in others have supported the idea as well, and to
Speaker 1: a certain extent, a switch to universal time already has
Speaker 1: taken place. Pilots and air traffic controllers in the US,
Speaker 1: for example, rely on Universal time, or Zulu time as
Speaker 1: they call it. Financial traders who's dealings sometimes cross borders
Speaker 1: as well as time zones, stamp transactions in Universal time
Speaker 1: as well to make sure that the pricing is correct,
Speaker 1: and the Internet essentially runs on universal time. Some might
Speaker 1: wonder if a switch to universal time would alter the
Speaker 1: rhythm of people's daily schedules, but Hanky doesn't think so.
Speaker 1: He said, people say, oh, if we went to universal time,
Speaker 1: that would mean would be opening businesses when it's dark outside. No,
Speaker 1: your business would go like it does now with the
Speaker 1: sun in New York or Baltimore. If you open normally
Speaker 1: at nine am, that would be four or two pm
Speaker 1: on your watch. It might take some getting used to,
Speaker 1: but Hanky thinks that within a generation children who grew
Speaker 1: up with universal time would no longer associate, say, seven
Speaker 1: am with breakfast time or nine am with starting work,
Speaker 1: and the switch is not unheard of. Henry said China
Speaker 1: currently has this problem and that it has one time
Speaker 1: zone for a huge swath of East West real estate,
Speaker 1: but it's totally cured by having local decisions as to
Speaker 1: opening closing times for businesses and so on that would
Speaker 1: obviously be essential for a worldwide system. Today's episode was
Speaker 1: written by Patrick J. Kaiger and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more on this and months of other timely topics,
Speaker 1: visit how Stuff Works dot com. Brain Stuff is production
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