When the Standardization of Time Arrived in America [audio] | Hacker News Reader

When the Standardization of Time Arrived in America [audio]

smithsonianmag.com

33 pointsjonbaer5 comments

You can still see clocks in the UK from the late 19th century which have two minute hands: one for the local time and the other for the official Greenwich time.

The Bristol Exchange has a big one with the hands ten minutes apart, since that's the difference between local noon in Bristol and noon at Greenwich.

Supposedly in Oxford you can still be 5 minutes and 2 seconds "late" for classes or meetings since that's the offset between there and Greenwich. I've only heard this third-hand - are there are any Oxonians out there who can confirm?

I can't listen to this at work unfortunately, but if it's not referenced in the podcast, let me recommend the book "Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time" by Clark Blaise. It's an interesting read about how he came up with the idea of standardizing time (within bounds) and how he managed to pursuade the world to go along with it.

There was no need to standardize time until it became possible and common to travel fast enough that regular old sidereal time was insufficient and even dangerous; i.e., until rail travel became common. It's only been 130 years since we all got pushed into the artificial noon most of us have today. (Some fortunate souls live on the line where it's actually noon when the clock says it is.)

Actually, your last line can only be true for mean solar time. The sun leads or lags mean solar time, by a varying amount described by the misleadingly-named Equation of Time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time#Apparent_solar_ti...

(The annual variation is due to two main factors: the tilt of the Earth and the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit. I got asked about this in a programming interview once and couldn't remember! Never again.)

> I got asked about this in a programming interview once and couldn't remember!

What specialty do you have where this is expected knowledge?

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