Show Notes:

• Brief history of Time Zones, who, and where original idea for it came from.
  • History
    • Greenwich Meridian
      • Britain, which already adopted its own standard time system for England, Scotland, and Wales, helped gather international consensus for global time zones in 1884. – timeanddate.com 
    • The International Meridian Conference – October 1884 – Washington DC
      • Established Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as world’s time standard
      • The main factors that favored Greenwich as the site of the prime meridian were:
        • Britain had more shipping and ships using the Greenwich Meridian than the rest of the world put together (at the time). The British Nautical Almanac started these charts in 1767.
        • The Greenwich Observatory produced data of the highest quality for a long time.
    • 1918 Standard Time Act
      • US officially adopted time zones across country
    • 1972 –  Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) replaced GMT as the world’s time standard. 
  • Impact then/impact now.
    • Russia currently has 11 time zones
    • China has one
    • Nepal is the only country with a time zone set to 45 minutes past the hour
    • North Korea
      • On Aug. 15, 2015, North Koreans put their clocks back half an hour to establish their own time zone, “Pyongyang time.” 
      • Less than three years later, the country put their clocks forward half an hour so they are again in the same time zone as South Korea.
  • Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar
    • Steve Hanke
      • economist with Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow with the CATO Institute think tank
    • Dick Henry
      • professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins
    • designed tofix the inefficiencies of the current one
    • Universal Time!
      • Still based on Coordinated Universal Time
      • Airlines already use Universal Time (Greenwich time)
      • must be local regional “opening and closing” hours for government offices and for businesses.

• Is it still something we need? What would be the possible implications of removing it, and how could that be put into place?

Sources:

• Ted Ed: How did trains standardize time in the United States? – William Heuisler
• The radical plan to destroy time zones – Washington Post
• It’s Time to Change the Calendar, Once and For All – Forbes
• When did the United States start using time zones? – History.com