Brief History of Standard Time and Sociocultural Effects

            Take a moment to think about how precise our measurement of time (an abstract concept) has become.  With a standard time zone chart, or a quick google search, you can figure out exactly what time it is anywhere in the world, and that used to not be the case.  Before 1880s, United States’ towns used local time, in which noon was when the sun was directly overhead and the minutes varied from clock to clock.  With railroad expansion, clock synchronization became necessary and towns could no longer have ambiguous times.  At noon on November 18, 1883 the railroads of the United States and Canada established railroad time, or their standard time zones, which eventually became national law on March 19, 1918 thanks to the Standard Time Act. 

However, the United States was not the standard time pioneer.  In 1840 Britain’s Great Western Railway was the first company to implement a standard time, the Greenwich Mean Time.  Forty years later the British government set it into law with the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act.  The Greenwich Mean Time was the basis to the Universal Time, which appoints a 0^ë longitude (prime meridian) as the reference point and other time zones being hour(s) ahead or behind it.   Before 1884’s International Meridian Convention there wasn’t a standard meridian, so countries published different maps and charts with the 0^ë longitude running through their capital, causing international navigation confusions, similar to the local time/railroad disorder.  Eventually, representatives from 25 countries came together at the convention and set Greenwich, England, as the international standard for the prime meridian.

It’s difficult to image this globalized world without a universal time because it underlies everything we do.  That being said standardizing time didn’t just standardize hour and minutes, it structured our culture in a very different way than it once was.  If time plays a role in every aspect of our lives, and time wasn’t exact, that means there’d be an undertone of flexibility instead of stress.  In that world if you had a job interview at, let’s say noon, you’d be there when the sun was overhead, instead of 12:00:00 PM.  So if you got the “12:05” who knew and who cared, but if you get there 12:05 today, well that just might cost you the job.   

Take another example, in November 2013 headlines arose that “Spain [Had] Been In the ‘Wrong’ Time Zone for 7 Decades” and the government is deciding whether or not to switch back to the correct time zone.  In 1940 Spain’s Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, aligned the country’s time with Nazi Germany’s, putting it ahead by one hour, and the country never switched back.  The way economist Javier Díaz-Giménez puts it is that “People got stuck in that time [and e]ventually, the clocks took over.” While reports show that Spaniards get less sleep, work longer hours cutting family/personal time, and are less efficient, some Spaniards are resisting the push to move back into their normal zone.  Spaniard Jorge Rodríguez explains that “It is the Spanish identity, to eat in another time, to sleep in another time,” becoming part of their culture. 

Standardizing time was a necessary function that streamlines our daily operation so efficiently that we hardly ever think about it.  As Jorge Luis Borges wrote,“Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” For better or for worse we’ve created a high strung culture obsessed with time (in places more than others). 

http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/prime-meridian/?ar_a=1

http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/d.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/how-when-and-why-were-tim_b_5838042.html?utm_hp_ref=travel&ir=Travel

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/world/europe/spain-land-of-10-pm-dinners-ponders-a-more-standard-time.html?_r=0