Thinking about time and our schedule

While you have a summer moment, perhaps it is worth thinking about time. The basics are: the Earth revolves around the sun. It takes one year (more or less) to achieve this. Each day, during this annual journey, the Earth spins once on its axis. A day is what we call the period of time for the sun to appear in the east each morning until the next sunrise. 

For millennia, people kept time in their lives by the sun. Sunrise? It’s morning. Sun above your head? It’s lunchtime, midday. Sunset? Night, bedtime. 

As they needed more accurate divisions of the day to measure the tides, the rise and ebb, we started marking out the day into hours. “The tide will be up in the sixth hour after dawn” and so on. 

As more accurate measurement of the tides became necessary, the hours were first divided into quarters and then minutes. Only recently has any need of seconds been necessary. In fact, most watches were made without second hands until the late 40s. As with any tool, the accuracy of the measurement of time reflects the needs of the tool user. 

Remember that the Earth spins? If you lived in Oxford, England 100 years ago, you probably didn’t travel to London in your whole lifetime. Travel was an unusual occupation in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

As Oxford is 1 degree of longitude west of the Prime Meridian (at Greenwich), the clocks there were set exactly 5 minutes after Greenwich Mean Time. In fact there is a clock there that still chimes 5 minutes after the one in London. 

For that spot on Earth, those two clocks are equally accurate — the sun rises and sets exactly at the same (local) time for each. At the time, 100 years ago, this accuracy worked fine. With the advent of trains, it became a nightmare.

Trains changed time. The need for timetables, all agreeing with the same arrival and departure, forced districts across the country to synchronize their local time to match the needs of the railway. When the distances became too big, they dropped an hour or added an hour and added a defining description to tell you what time you were really talking about: Eastern Standard Time, Mountain Time and so on. 

Now, airplanes may tell you the departure and arrival times in local time zones, but pilots have reverted to global standard Greenwich Mean Time, GMT, (Zulu for short) for all navigation. This is critical for them to avoid errors in navigational plotting that spans the globe and, not least, traffic mishaps. If a pilot tells the La Guardia control tower he’s arriving at 12:30 Zulu they know this means 7:30am EST and can clear the runway. 

Telephone companies, the Internet, and satellite transmissions similarly deal with GMT (now called Coordinated Universal Time, to make it, well, less British).

The world we live in has become busier, with flextime work schedules and constant response needed, done wherever you are. We may all shortly, like the tides, need to know what the global schedule is, what the same time is for everyone at one moment. 

If you were running Ford, with offices, plants and distribution centers across the globe, it would be more efficient to know that at 02:30 Zulu the order left an office, at 11:20 Zulu was fulfilled by the plant and at 23:00 Zulu was delivered to the distribution center. It wouldn’t matter that the office was in Stuttgart, the plant in Detroit and the distribution center in Los Angeles. The schedule would be understandable by all, even those who needed to go to work in the dark to comply.

For most of us, the day begins with first light and ends after dark, but the new machines we’ve built, like the trains of the last century, already demand that we change our lifestyles to match schedules with people far over the horizon. Once again, timekeeping will be coordinated to allow us to efficiently match all our efforts. 

The pity is, the sun will still come up at the same time, the tides will ebb and flow on their own clock and we, on our new world schedule, will be further out of tune with nature. Somehow, that “late” clock in Oxford looks more inviting every minute.

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.