Just over a century ago, towns and cities set their own time. People have lived in different time zones for a long time, but it hasn’t always been as organized as it is today. Since different parts of Earth enter and exit daylight at different times, we need different time zones. Noon would be the middle of the day in some places, but it would be morning, evening, and the middle of the night in others. Imagine if the entire Earth had a single time zone. When your location rotates out of sunlight, you see the sun set. As your location on Earth rotates into sunlight, you see the sun rise. As Earth rotates, different parts of Earth receive sunlight or darkness, giving us day and night. Every 24 hours, the Earth makes a complete rotation. You know our planet is a sphere that spins on an imaginary pole called its axis. To understand time zones, start by thinking about the shape of the Earth. How is that possible? Is it time travel? Of course not! They just live in a different time zone. What time is it where you are? Have you ever traveled to another place and experienced a time change? Maybe you know someone who lives far away and is a few hours ahead of you. As technology and innovation move us forward, people look for ways for our timekeeping to keep up.Quick, find the nearest clock. As our world becomes more connected, especially online, some advocate that we do away with time zones altogether, with everyone using Universal Coordinated Time. Airlines and the international finance industry use Coordinated Universal Time, a 24-hour standard time that is used to set time zones around the world, to ensure that things happen on time, no matter the location. While it may seem like time is something fixed and unchanging, the creation of time zones (as well as regional time shifts like Daylight Saving Time) proves that it’s not. In 1883, American and Canadian railroads began using four different time zones across the continent, and in 1884, Fleming helped to convene the International Prime Meridian Conference, where standard time and time zones were made official. This way, time would still be set according to daylight, but would also be standardized to solve the problem of different times in different places. This experience gave him the idea for a standard time, with hourly variations according to different zones around the world. Sir Sanford Fleming, who worked as an engineer for Canadian railways, knew this problem firsthand when he missed a train in 1876. High noon on the west coast was hours later than it was on the east, making it hard to know when trains would depart or arrive. In many ways, the invention brought people closer together, but, regarding time, it highlighted the differences between them. As the hosts note in the Locomotion episode of Ingenious, railroads changed many aspects of life, allowing people and goods to travel greater distances in much shorter time spans. That all changed with the invention of the railroad. Trains got us to our destinations faster.but complicated time For much of history, people weren’t often traveling far from home, and the slight differences between nearby towns didn’t matter much. This meant that the clocks different cities and towns were set to different times according to location. “High noon” – the point where the sun is highest in the sky – was 12pm, and clocks were set accordingly. This continued well into the 19th century. While later inventions, like clocks, didn’t rely on the sun the way that a sundial or obelisk would, people still used day and night as a reference to set their time. One such invention was time zones.Īs Trace and Susannah note in the Clocks episode of Ingenious, timekeeping has been around for millennia, and many timekeeping inventions used the sun’s position in the sky to determine the time of day. Other times, they remedy issues that new inventions create. Often, these innovations improve upon what came before. In the video series Ingenious, hosts Trace Dominguez and Susannah Carroll discuss how innovations build on previous inventions to create things that we all live with and use every day. Throughout history, inventors have sought ways to solve problems and make people’s lives better.
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