Time zones
A brief back and forth with Derek Sivers made me pause. While it was today for me, it was already tomorrow for someone else, and suddenly I found myself thinking about time zones, this silent structure we rely on every single day without really noticing. Something so ordinary — baked into every calendar, every meeting, every “What time works for you?” — is actually the result of a more complex idea. Someone, somewhere, decided to make time line up across the world.
For most of history, though, time was a local affair. Each town kept its own clock. Noon was simply when the sun stood highest overhead. That worked fine until railroads and telegraphs connected distant places and suddenly, everyone needed to agree on when things happened.
In 1879, a Canadian engineer named Sandford Fleming proposed a global system: 24 time zones, each an hour apart. A few years later, nations met in Washington D.C. and chose Greenwich as the starting point.
From that moment on, time wasn’t just local anymore. It became a shared, coordinated rhythm that stitched the world together.
Source: Rosenberg, Matt. "The History and Use of Time Zones." ThoughtCo, May 12, 2025. thoughtco.com/what-are-time-zones-1435358
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