Time warped

The weird way we divide up days, minutes and seconds has led to disaster

A Million Years in a Day A Curious History of Everyday Life from the Stone Age to the Phone Age by Greg Jenner Thomas Dunne Books

It’s 10 o’clock in Brooklyn. But what time is it in Queens?

The question may seem ridiculous, but according to this new book by British historian Greg Jenner about the evolution of some of the most basic elements of our lives, it wasn’t that long ago that nearby American cities could have completely different ideas about time.

“One bus timetable saw a 35-mile stretch of highway between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, span seven different time zones,” Jenner writes of a period shortly after World War II.

Given the importance of time in the structure of our lives, it’s easy to forget that its measurement is a manufactured construct that has always changed between cultures and eras. As recently as 1793, the French decided to abandon the division of time by multiples of 12 — 24-hour days, 60-minute hours, etc. — and use a base of 10 instead.

“The 24-hour day was suddenly chopped up into 10 distinct hours,” Jenner writes, “with each hour comprising 100 minutes, and each min- ute lasting 100 seconds.”

Echoing a system used by ancient Egyptians, this also called for weeks to be 10 days long, and years, 10 months. The experiment was a disaster and quickly forgotten.

In general, time has been measured by the rising and setting of the sun, based on the location and the season.

It was conceivable, therefore, that one town could be 10 minutes ahead of another town 100 miles away, depending on when sunrise hit.

By the mid-1800s, the introduction of passenger trains, which required reliable schedules, made this a serious problem. Our time zones were adopted in 1883, and Daylight Saving Time (DST) was implemented in 1918.

Unfortunately, writes Jenner, “the government allowed individual states and cities the freedom to opt in or out” of DST, and this led to chaos.

As other schedule-dependent industries, such as airlines and television, came to the fore, this time-confusion had deeper repercussions, as “their detailed schedules were impossible to manage on account of all the varying time zones.

“Even local bus timetables were lucky to survive [a few weeks] without having to be totally rewritten,” Jenner writes, “as cities and states embraced, and then abandoned, Daylight Saving Time like fickle children instantly bored by their once-desired Christmas presents.”

Sometimes, this had dire, even lifeor-death repercussions.

“Every now and again, the eyerolling nuisance of it all morphed into genuine risk,” he writes, “and motorists might drive nonchalantly over level crossings only for unexpected cargo trains — supposedly not due for an hour — to suddenly thunder towards them, with horn blaring in panicked warning.”

A solution only began to materialize in the ’60s. The 1966 Uniform Time Act “standardized a period of six months for DST across America, between the last Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October (although four states immediately withdrew).”

Daylight Saving Time was later extended to seven months, and the problem was fixed — sort of.

To this day, Arizona opts out due to concerns about energy conservation related to the state’s extreme heat, and there’s a bill working its way through the California State Assembly right now seeking to exempt that state as well.

While our current system might not be the ultimate solution, it is perhaps the best we can hope for in a chaotic, divisive world.

“Timekeeping is not just an area of scientific enquiry, but also part of our cultural heritage,” Jenner writes. “We define time just as much as it defines us.”