Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so
Jul. 30th, 2008 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatarperegrineWhen visiting Oxford, you learn that Great Tom tolls 101 times at 9:05 every evening. This is a longstanding tradition harking back to when Christ Church College had 101 undergraduates and a 9 p.m. curfew. But 9:05? That's because the curfew was at 9 p.m. Oxford time, which is five minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.
Before I learned this, it had never occurred to me that there was a time before time zones. But it's obvious once you think about it: towns used to have their own clocks, set to "apparent local time," with noon being when the sun was overhead. So, really, every village used to be its own time zone.
As soon as I realized this I started wondering when these myriad local times gave way to a standard time. At what point would the villages have synchronized their watches? What would have prompted it?
The answer was, I guess, sort of obvious: railroads. Before the advent of railroads, it mattered to practically nobody that noon in Dover was 12:30 in Penzance. But once people had to read train timetables to figure out when the train would be at their station, the difference between local times became bothersome.
The first move towards standardization came in 1840, when The Great Western Railway announced all its timetables would be printed based on London time, not local times. Stations then had to keep multiple clocks, showing both local time and "railway time." (The Tom Tower clock in Oxford was even fitted with a second minute hand, so it could show both Oxford and Greenwich times.) But maintaining two different times was confusing, so by 1885, not only were all rail lines operating on railway time (synchronized by means of the newfangled telegraph), 98% of clocks in Britain had switched over as well.
The story is similar in the States. The drive to standardize began in 1853, when 14 people died in a train crash because different local times led to a scheduling error. Rail lines began to standardize by using the local time of the major city on each route, but this still meant that hub train stations had to have a clock per route -- Pittsburgh had six!
A guy named Dowd finally came up with the idea of one-hour time zones in the 1860s, and in 1883 the General Time Convention (what a great name) agreed to adopt four time zones for the continental US. November 18, 1883 became "the day of two noons," when people across the U.S. reset their watches to one of the four standard time zones.
The Indianapolis Sentinel commented:
Sources:
http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/railway.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone
http://www.fremo.org/betrieb/timezone.htm
Before I learned this, it had never occurred to me that there was a time before time zones. But it's obvious once you think about it: towns used to have their own clocks, set to "apparent local time," with noon being when the sun was overhead. So, really, every village used to be its own time zone.
As soon as I realized this I started wondering when these myriad local times gave way to a standard time. At what point would the villages have synchronized their watches? What would have prompted it?
The answer was, I guess, sort of obvious: railroads. Before the advent of railroads, it mattered to practically nobody that noon in Dover was 12:30 in Penzance. But once people had to read train timetables to figure out when the train would be at their station, the difference between local times became bothersome.
The first move towards standardization came in 1840, when The Great Western Railway announced all its timetables would be printed based on London time, not local times. Stations then had to keep multiple clocks, showing both local time and "railway time." (The Tom Tower clock in Oxford was even fitted with a second minute hand, so it could show both Oxford and Greenwich times.) But maintaining two different times was confusing, so by 1885, not only were all rail lines operating on railway time (synchronized by means of the newfangled telegraph), 98% of clocks in Britain had switched over as well.
The story is similar in the States. The drive to standardize began in 1853, when 14 people died in a train crash because different local times led to a scheduling error. Rail lines began to standardize by using the local time of the major city on each route, but this still meant that hub train stations had to have a clock per route -- Pittsburgh had six!
A guy named Dowd finally came up with the idea of one-hour time zones in the 1860s, and in 1883 the General Time Convention (what a great name) agreed to adopt four time zones for the continental US. November 18, 1883 became "the day of two noons," when people across the U.S. reset their watches to one of the four standard time zones.
The Indianapolis Sentinel commented:
"People will have to marry by railroad time, and die by railroad time. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time - banks will open and close by railroad time - in fact, the Railroad Convention has taken charge of the time business, and the people may as well set about adjusting their affairs in accordance with its decree. ... We presume the sun, moon and stars will make an attempt to ignore the orders of the Railroad Convention, but they, too, will have to give in at last."
Sources:
http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/railway.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone
http://www.fremo.org/betrieb/timezone.htm
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 09:32 pm (UTC)Germany was late
Date: 2008-07-30 10:27 pm (UTC)Timezones , timekeeping are intimatelybound with transport ( and navigation ) In part the demand for precise navigation == knowing on what Meridian one is was connected to reliable and correct timekeeping. Some precision chronographs were developed with that aim in mind.
( I Think - but don't know that The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco deals with navigation, meridians and timekeeping. Have yet to read it )
no subject
Date: 2008-07-31 02:05 am (UTC)Chronology
Date: 2008-07-31 09:50 am (UTC)My curiosity started with wondering how an absolute date for a year was established. To figure what happened in the fifth year of the reign of Constantine could be reckoned. But how did it relate to what happened in the first year of the reign of Charlemagne?
It's similar to your hours analogy. The absolute establishing of the years were unnecessary until one wanted to develop a history and have it include not only Constantine and Charlemagne but also Saladin, the Ming dynasty, the Tongan kings, etc.
So a yardstick has been established, using the supposed time of the birth of the Christ of the Christian religion, BC and AD. That raises a lot of questions. Among these are cultural imperialism: "But we aren't Christian; so calling a date 'in the Year of our Lord' (Anno Domini) doen't feel right."
That can be handled either by accepting another calendar (from the time of Mohammed's Hegira, etc.) Or the BC/AD terms can be generalized: BC/CE (before the Common Era/ Common Era)
But even accepting the Western chronology, BC/AD, how do you establish when Jesus was born? Obviously, King Herod didn't text the Emperor Augustus and say, "We need to lay down this year as a marker for a new calendar system. You see, this baby was born... From now on
you won't count the year from the establishment of Rome but from him."
So if Herod didn't lay down the date for the birth of jesus, who did and when. And if it was many years later than Herod, how did he count back? And did he get it right.
First of all, it was a 'he'. He was a monk in Romania in the sixth century (er, we only know he lived in the sixth century after he established it to be the sixth century after Christ) by the name of Dionysius Exiguus, Dennis the Less or Mini Denny)
You'll have to read about him on Wikipedia to get the details of how he went about trying to establish when Jesus was born. As there were no history books yet as we know them he calculated the date by means of astronomy. That was quite a feat and was so accurate that we now calculate that he was only four or six years off. (Which leaves the interesting conundrum that Jesus was born about five years before Christ.)
No modern scientist would use the strange and complicated system he used to calculate the date by stars and cycles and the like. Wikipedia didn't exist when i was first investigating chronology; the article on Denny is worth reading. Among other things, he was probably the first person to use the concept of zero. There was no word for it in the Latin language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysius_Exiguus
So who picked up his dating scheme and established it as the 'railroad timetable' for establishing the years. That's another interesting chapter in the story of chronology. Buy the next issue of Cornhill magazine!