Timezones: A Relic of Timekeepers’-Past
“YOUR FAVOURITE COMPETITORS GO HEAD TO HEAD IN THE MOST DRAMATIC COMPETITION OF THE SEASON. DON’T MISS IT, AT 8/7 CENTRAL, ONLY ON ABC.”
It’s a familiar phrase to anyone who has watched prime-time television. While I haven’t seen an ad like this in quite some time, thanks to our new media-streaming landscape, I’ve always been bothered, thinking about this common expression. It always seemed to beg the question “8 o’clock…where?!” This question becomes even more pressing around this special time of year: the end of Daylight Savings Time.
Now you might be thinking to yourself Hey guy, just type 7:00 PM Central into Google and your problem is solved. No doubt, that would help me find out when my favourite group of castaways will next snuff each other out (literally and figuratively), but to me, this conundrum seems to be reminiscent of a larger issue. In a post-globalization world, where international communication and planning are essential, why should we continue using our antiquated, localized way of telling time? To answer this question, I think it’s important to first understand where the idea of timezones came from.
As it turns out, timezones are a relatively young construct. Back in the days of the early 1880s and earlier, the telling of time was even further localized than it is now. Each municipality would have a centralized “town clock” which would be the standard for which each person in the community would set their own clocks and watches. The time telling business was booming, as pioneering entrepreneurs sold the services of synchronizing customer’s home clocks every week, keeping folks prompt. However, one day, in 1883, all of that would change.
You see, we’re talking about the era where trains were starting to take over North America — one of the earliest baby-steps towards the industrial revolution that would kickstart the deeply-connected, globalized world that we live in today. Having a different time in each town a train stops obviously poses a fairly substantial problem, in terms of scheduling the arrival and departure of goods and people. Enter Sir Sanford Fleming, a Scottish-Canadian railway engineer. After missing a train in Ireland in 1876, due to confusion with the posted schedule, Sir Fleming began proposing his idea for “Cosmic Time”: a global 24-hour clock based on the time in Greenwich, England. He discussed this concept of a standardized global time at the International Meridian Conference in 1884.
While this conference opted to implement a different proposal for universal time, Fleming’s structure, which had evolved to include twenty-four standardized “zones” separated fifteen longitudinal degrees apart, proved to be more publicly popular. By 1929, most major countries on earth had adopted the system of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), splitting the globe into the distinct timezones we observe today, adding or subtracting one hour from the time in Greenwich, depending on your location’s proximity to the “Prime Meridian.” That is why when changing the timezone on your phone or laptop you often see in brackets “GMT -9,” or something similar. However, with that being said, even today our “universal” system for telling time is not entirely agreed upon.
Take, for example, half-hour timezones. Some places like Iran, Australia, Sri Lanka, and even Newfoundland have time variations of only a half-hour, splitting each timezone even further. In fact, Nepal goes further, dividing their timezones up at fifteen-minute intervals. All of this disagreement between nations and more localized governments on what timezone to abide by is a recipe for needless confusion, especially given the common understanding of how timezones are a supposedly standardized system. All of this got me thinking: if one pasty Canadian man can revolutionize the way society tells time to keep up with the currents of innovation, why can’t another?
Since the days of Sir Fleming’s “Cosmic Time” proposal, a lot has changed. We no longer travel through horse-drawn buggies and trains, but with automobiles and airplanes (sure, sometimes trains too, but now we have trains that freaking float; my point is, we’ve come a long way). I can watch a live event happening across the world on a screen that is higher resolution than my own eyes with only a few milliseconds of delay, or I can share my underdeveloped thoughts on global happenings in a 240-character word-blast that could potentially be seen by millions. Nearly everything I own has been made on continents I have never visited. The world is radically different from the days of Sir Sanford Fleming.
Despite all of this innovation and progress, we continue to rely on a chronological measurement system that was made to convenience a society that no longer exists in the way that it used to. It’s time that our clocks reflected the new, globally-connected world we live in. Now, yes, it is incredibly comfortable to have high-noon be at the zenith of the Sun’s journey across our sky no matter where we are in the world, but I would argue that the days of taking off in a plane and landing at “the same time of day” ought to be behind us.
The solution is incredibly simple. We should adopt the original plan of Fleming’s Cosmic Time, using the Prime Meridian (Greenwich Mean Time) as the basis for our global clocks. No more artificially adjusting the numbers to make hours concurrent with the path of the Sun. No more ante meridiem and post meridiem, or AM and PM. Instead, we should adopt the 24-hour clock, seeing as there are 24 hours in a day. I mean, that just makes sense, does it not?
Don’t get me wrong, I understand entirely that this will take a long time to adjust to. Waking up at 18:00 would be rather startling from a contemporary logic, even if it was just as the sun was rising. What should be remembered when considering this topic is that the way that we communicate time is nothing more than a construct from our brains that bears no significance on the natural world in which we live. All it takes to adjust is practice. We have proven in the past that we can make this change, even if it is gradual. Look at the way we measure distance, volume, or temperature, for example. It wasn’t until 1971 that Canada officially started measuring in the Metric system rather than Imperial. Most countries on earth have a story similar to this as well. If (almost) all of us have been capable of switching from inches to centimetres, why can’t we make this change as well?
I argue that this form of telling time would substantially simplify the way we communicate with one another. In a world as fundamentally-globalized as ours, I think that this clarity would be highly productive. Now, is it that hard to quickly search up a time-converter website and find out what time it is elsewhere in the world? Or to, *gulp*, do the math in your head, the old-fashioned way? No, it’s not. That being said, I argue it is a worthwhile endeavour to popularize a global clock that reflects the cosmic reality of our world and simplifies international communication. Something as simple as time should not be nearly as complicated as it currently is. Each year the world celebrates the start of a new year every hour on the hour for twenty-four hours. To me at least, that notion seems incredibly artificial and just plain silly.
I have no expectation that this reality I envision will come to life any time soon. Just look at how much trouble we are having ridding ourselves of needlessly adjusting our clocks just so farmers of the past could trick themselves into waking up an hour earlier during harvesting season. If you ask me, this hardship is worth the effort, even if it takes a while to adjust. Look at the time-telling system we have today: it was created in the 1880s and wasn’t fully adopted until 1929. Let us bring our clocks into the future the same way that we’ve done with our transportation, media, and communication. Sooner or later we will have to reconsider the way that we approach time; I say that time is now.
