Railway time
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
> By 1852 a telegraph link had been constructed between a new electro-magnetic clock at Greenwich and initially Lewisham, and shortly after this London Bridge stations. It also connected via the Central Telegraph Station of the Electric Time Company in the City of London, which enabled the transmission of a time signal along the railway telegraphic network to other stations. By 1855 time signals from Greenwich could be sent through wires alongside the railway lines across the length and breadth of Britain.[1]
By the late 19th Century, they had invented "master clocks":
> Between the late 1800s and the availability of Internet time services, many large institutions that depended on accurate timekeeping such as schools, offices, railway networks, telephone exchanges, and factories used master/slave clock networks. These consisted of multiple slave clocks and other timing devices, connected through wires to a master clock which kept them synchronized by electrical signals. The master clock was usually a precision pendulum clock with a seconds pendulum and a robust mechanism. It generated periodic timing signals by electrical contacts attached to the mechanism, transmitted to the controlled equipment through pairs of wires.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time#Influence_of_the_...
The cynic in me doesn't find this even mildly surprising. Faced with an inevitable outcome, which had clear benefits, with no discernable down-sides [1], the population still managed to find the time, energy and will to fight.
This stubbornness seems to be baked into the human condition, this "they can't tell we what to do" sounds suspiciously like small child having a tantrum.
As their world changed, it brought about new challenges, which required cooperation to solve. And it was the cooperation rather than the solution which proved to be a stumbling block.
I'm working hard to resist ending this note with a highly sarcastic sentence.
[1] the differences being small, typically 15 mins or so.
So the downside is “you can more effectively yield your power here”, or more specifically: “you can take more in taxes and conscription.”
Centralized time might be pretty small in the scheme of centralization - and come with numerous other benefits - but, that generalized resistance doesn’t come from nowhere, or irrationality, or stupidity.
IMHO it’s not that “don’t tell me what to do” is baked into the human condition, it’s that we bake into our condition that when people tell you what to do, it’s better for them and not necessarily better for you.
If we make decisions, to our own detriment, purely to be in opposition, then I think that's irrational.
It's hard to give an example that won't immediately derail this conversation, precisely because every topic seems to be judged on what position the other side has, but its not hard to see this play out every day.
But I do think we socialize people to be obstinate, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, some of which are:
1) How often has someone told you what to do, and been more right, versus times they’ve been more wrong, or missing something about your situation, or lying about their motivations and goals, such that what they were telling you wasn’t actually what you should do?
2) Totally makes sense to me that towns, etc, would have a history of the central authority showing up and saying “change like this”, and only awhile later finding out why that was bad for them.
3) AFAIK, most of the time the experience a town would have with a central authority is that authority showing up to take something the town doesn’t want to give.
So you put all that together, and it makes sense to me that people would resist something like centralized time keeping “just because”.
If you see life as a zero sum game, then you are primed to distrust everyone and everything. This mistrust is often well-placed. The inability to separate good suggestions from bad ones though is a flaw.
Some can be objectively good, perhaps more easily seen by a neutral outsider, and yet still be fought against. Because if we're not fighting then we're fools?
Resistance makes sense unless you have good reasons to trust the other party.
There are of course lots of zero-sum situations. Equally there are lots of mutually beneficial opportunities. Ironically those who can't see those opportunities ultimately end up losing, which reinforces the zero-sum world-view.
Government is, though, a solution to 'collective action' problems, which usually have prisoner's dilemma payoff matrices.
A problem could be solved if everyone acted. But individually, none of them have the incentive to act alone, so the default result is for nobody to act.
Government allows a group of people to agree that when there's a collective action benefit available, they'll take it, together.
That is explicitly not a zero sum outcome.
From the Wikipedia article:
> A main theme of this book [...] is that states operate systems of power toward 'legibility' in order to see their subjects correctly in a top-down, modernist, model that is flawed, problematic, and often ends poorly for subjects. The goal of local legibility by the state is transparency from the top down, from the top of the tower or the center/seat of the government, so the state can effectively operate upon their subjects.
I can definitely see that happening with excessive reporting in corporate life. Also seems somewhat analogous to the corporate/state mass surveillance topic (à la Snowden).
I think the word you're looking for is subordination.
So perhaps its no surprise that there was a general mistrust of attempts to control time
Cui bono? If it doesn't benefit the locals much, why should they change? If it does benefit, then why the need to force the change? Just run the two in parallel and if the benefit is clear enough the old way will die out naturally.
Maybe in the future we'll have federated units, each person able to use their own measuring system - and also universal translation so every individual can speak their own unique language.
More than you probably know: Which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?
The pound of feathers weighs more because for precious metals, like gold, the Troy system is used, and a Troy pound is the equivalent of 373 grams:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight#Troy_pound_(lb_t)
Meanwhile the feathers are measured in the Avoirdupois system, where one pound is the equivalent of 450 grams:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoirdupois
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_pound
Now: which weighs more, an ounce of feathers or an ounce of gold? The ounce of gold, because there are 12 troy ounces in a pound, while there are 16 (avoirdupois/'regular') ounces in a (avoirdupois) pound, so the gold would be 31 grams and the feathers would be 28 grams.
See also the difference between the 'international' foot (0.3048 meters) and the US survey foot 1200/3937 meters (a difference of only one one-hundredth of a foot per mile):
* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/geodesy/international-foot.htm...
Plys, the US uses both systems. Imperial is just more practical for everyday use.
See your foot down there near the ground? Tada! You have a built-in measuring tool. How neat is that?
However when we discuss local time and adjusting a local time to the central time, we come to some very different conclusions. For example in Europe, countries from Poland to Spain are in the same timezone. This is very good for business - when you schedule a meeting at 9:00 AM, then it is the same 9:00 AM everywhere (on a side note, never schedule meetings at 9:00, be kind and at least do 9:30). The problems is that what is good for conducting business is not good for regular people, because due to the "one big time zone" a lot of people live in.. a wrong time-zone. This is very clear when you look at Spain, where the sun shines after 22:00 (10:00 PM) - while there is no sun when people are supposed to wake up. At the same time, those in Poland live a miserable life - the sun shines very early, but when you leave work -> there is no more sun (meanwhile Germans have around 1 hour more sun after work, the french 2 hours more sun after work and Spaniards have like 3-4 more hours). Here of course I assumed the 9-5 work (9:00 - 17:00) what is typical for office workers. The rule is that if you live east from the correct time you are screwed by having less sun. This impacts your quality of life. Imagine you spent your whole life losing 2 hours of sun every day.
I swear I saw research somewhere that showed the same is in USA, those on the western part of a timezone are richer than those on the eastern part as well, what removes the historical reasons from war-torn Europe, impact of communism etc.
As far as I know China has one big time-zone for the whole country. I wonder how it works when the official 7AM is 4AM "sun time" in another part.
In theory people could somehow adjust their hours to the local time, but usually they dont. Offices start at 8:00 or 9:00 AM (and at least more and more allows flexible start or work from home), so those that live east have simply less sun exposure - more miserable life. When sun shines - you are more keen to go outside, for a jog, or whatever. When it is dark? You cannot quantify this easily.
My life quality went up when I was able to push most lectures at the college from 10:40. In high-school, we were starting at the "standard" 8:00 and sometimes even 7:05.
In Poland 15:30 and no sun in winter. In France (same time zone) there is sun at 17:30. So if you live in France you can get some sun.
Same works if you love across states in USA. The farther west the better for you.
So from that perspective not liking precise time keeping (and structuring the day not using the sun but the clock) is very understandable.
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/see-londons-six-swiss-r...
> The second hand takes 58.5 seconds to rotate around by 59 seconds, then the second hand pauses. It waits until a nationwide pulse is sent to every Swiss railway clock that a minute has passed, then the clock jumps to the minute and carries on for another 58.5 seconds.
Apple (potentially) copied (?) the design in 2012 and there was a bit of drama about it and they ended up cutting a cheque:
* https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367216/apple-sbb-mondain...
* https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/time-is-money-apple-...
The obvious challenges include motion of the ship and huge ranges of temperature encountered on global voyages.
Britain invented the best maritime clocks by encouraging open competition for a large prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards
See the book Longitude by Dava Sobel.
You can see John Harrison's chronometers at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich - on the top of a small hill in a park in south-east London. It really is amazing how the original desktop clock monsters were shrunk down to a pocket watch that had better accuracy.
Greenwich was the prime meridian because Britain invented the best clocks.
Not 'requires' — there are other ways to determine longitude.
I've read the book and seen the clocks. They are amazing.
> Greenwich was the prime meridian because Britain invented the best clocks.
I think that's backwards though. They would have ruled the waves regardless, and Greenwich would have still been the prime meridian.
International Meridian Congress (Washington) 1884.
France waits until they can adopt a name that does not mention Greenwich ... 1978.
The French are very tenacious in their (to put it politely) arrogant obstructionist individualism. Shrug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Confere...
Resolution 2, fixing the meridian at Greenwich, was passed 22–1 (San Domingo, now the Dominican Republic, voted against); France and Brazil abstained. The French did not adopt the Greenwich meridian as the beginning of the universal day until 1911. Even then it refused to use the name "Greenwich", instead using the term "Paris mean time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds". France finally replaced this phrase with "Coordinated Universal Time" (UTC) in 1978.
The Paris meridian is a meridian line running through the Paris Observatory in Paris, France – now longitude 2°20′14.02500″ East.
It was a long-standing rival to the Greenwich meridian as the prime meridian of the world.
The "Paris meridian arc" or "French meridian arc" (French: la Méridienne de France) is the name of the meridian arc measured along the Paris meridian.
It (the Greenwich meridian) became the standard via weight of maps and naval strength of the British, there are many maps from the early days that don't follow the Greenwich standard, enough so that "wrong longitude because we assumed wrong meridian" is a minor trope in treasure map stories.
Sort of. Lots of countries used a local meridian as their 0 degrees reference for longitude. Then in 1884 there as the International Meridian Conference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Confere...) which chose Greenwich as the reference line. The same conference also voted to have midnight be the start of the day for astronomical and nautical purposes (instead of noon).
The French objected to using Greenwich and hung on to the Paris meridian until into the 20th century. But the practicality of lots of maps using Greenwich (because of Britain's naval power) swayed people to have Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.