Saturday, November 5, 2011
Flotsam and Jetsam Time for sale
Posted by Steve Bogira on 11.05.11 at 11:13 PM
- Dave Stokes
I plan to spend my extra hour munching on star gooseberries, and washing them down with either an arf and arf, some Chris Holmes Kool-Aid, or maybe just a little cheap wine.
Or maybe I'll sleep.
Comments (3)
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Ah, missing the banking story once again, Steve: Robbed once again. You deposited that hour last spring, and have got it back without interest now. Occupy the Time-Space Continuum.
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dislikeFunny. But there really is a Big Money/Corporation story here, Sparky. Time used to be a much more local matter. In the 1850s, noon in Chicago was 11:27 AM in Omaha, 11:50 AM in Saint Louis, 12:31 PM in Pittsburgh. Who cared? But then the railroads started to grow, and they insisted on a standardized time, since they needed it for their scheduling. And in November 1883, so it was. "The sun told time from Genesis to 12:01 AM on Nov. 18, 1883, when the railroads dispensed with it," Jack Beatty writes in Age of Betrayal. It was then but a short step to messing with our body clocks twice a year. How I miss the confused time of yesteryear, when missing a deadline was easier to explain.
Oh come now, surely your ISP can flake. System update snafu, etc.
I'd be happy to stick to Daylight Savings all year round, seeing as how I'm not out in the fields at 5 am. Or four. Whatever. Oppressive, having nighttime at 4:30 pm. I try to console myself by being grateful for not living further north. Guess adjusting for latitude would work less well.
Come to think of it, there's a disconnect between the standard-time stories. There's the railroad one, and then there's the shipping one, the GMT/Longitude Prize one that Dava Sobel wrote about. They all used the same chronometers & Royal Observatory clock, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to keep track of position, so time was standard, not local. And that one was empire-funded, not corporation-funded, iirc. What did we do, just ignore the whole chronometer business on land?
And again: the telegraph would've done it anyway, no? If you want someone to show up on the other end of the line, they have to know when to do it. Tiresome to be hanging around waiting for someone to decide it's 12:15. Surely some nerd can explain. But I think the railroads were just riding the 200-year wave of busting out of the locality -- empire, exploration, trade, mobility. All great stuff till the pandemic hits.
