Hey! Welcome to Hey That's Cool or HTC. This is a podcast all about stuff that's cool. Some things featured might be inherently cool and snatch your interest imidieatly but other things are cool even though at first glance they don't seem to be. On this site you will find all of my podcasts in chronological order of when I first published them on YouTube. There will be an imbeded video of each as well as a transcript for those who would rather read the podcast. Hope you enjoy, Apollo 300 over and out.
Transcript:
This is Apollo 300 and you're listening to Hey That’s Cool and today what’s cool is time. because time is cool and you know it's time for a podcast about time because it's a new year why not start the new year with some time.
Okay, so there are lots of things I could talk about relating to time such as the cycle of the sun and moon and earth and stuff like that or about clocks or about pocket watches. Lots things can be said about pocket watches. But right now, we're going to talk about time and the idea of standard time as in, time zones. Like the kind where, it was new year’s in New York before it was new year’s in California. We start our story with a guy named Standford Fleming.
Once upon a time Stanford Fleming was on a train in Ireland. And he's looking at his time table of when all the trains come in and on his timetable there happens to be a misprinting and he misses his train and has to get on some weird carriage across the country because he missed his darn train it super annoying and he’s like, “Hey it wouldn’t it be super useful if everyone had a standard time all around the world so that everywhere it was always the same time and I don't have to be on the stupid carriage right now jeez”. Ok, Maybe he wasn't on a carriage but the point is; we need some sort of standard time because right now where he is in the 1800s, each little city and its own time. And so it might be 3:00 in 1 town and across the river in another town it would be like 3:15. And with the invention of railroads which had just come out which were spreading across countries and connecting up lots and lots of towns. Those 15 minutes difference between one town and another was what calls so many trains to crash. And so Fleming decided he wanted to make a thing called cosmic time. Where everyone would have the same time starting in Greenwich and going around and making time zones. And he proposed the idea to the Royal Canadian Institute in 1879. And he thought that there would be time zones that where everyone could stop lunch when the sun was highest in the sky. Noon would always be son was always up in the sky and say 11:00 at night the sun would always be down. He wanted to call it Cosmic Time because it was like everyone's time was all the same than different all throughout the cosmos. And people liked it okay but they wanted to change some things about the specific time zones he had made and so the International Meridian Conference was pretty chill about his idea but they didn’t want to call it Cosmic Time. Instead they called it Universal Time because it's so much different, clearly. So they went around and they tweaked some of the time zones that he had invented and later on some other changes would be made to make sure that the date line in which one day turns into the next didn't overlap random small islands.
Which is why if you flip around the globe to the Pacific Ocean and your globe happens to have time zones on it; Unlike all the other time zones it's pretty weird looking. Kind of ziggity because there's a lot of small islands around there and it be super annoying if it was Saturday on one side of your island and Sunday on the other so they made sure to compensate that out.
But there's also other weird things such as well for example if you live in the United States you know that there's more than one time zone in one country. However in places like China they decided to have one time zone throughout all of their country which can make things super duper weird especially when you're trying to call someone in China and you're trying to call someone somewhere else in Asia they can have 2 countries that are right next to each other and yet have totally different times
So anyway, time zones are really weird and yeah that's the podcast. Thank you for listening hope you listen again. Apollo 300 over and out.
