Telling Time

This New Year’s Eve, we’ll watch the beginning of 2015 be celebrated again and again, from Hong Kong to Barcelona to New York to Hawaii. Our global time zones seem so straightforward, but it took more than 50 years to put them fully in place. Assistant Professor of History Vanessa Ogle writes about the mental blocks and politics that went into setting the time in her forthcoming book Contesting Time: The Global Struggle for Uniformity and Its Unintended Consequences, 1870s-1950s. Her manuscript has already received the Social Science History Association President’s Award for best book of 2014.

The movement to globalize time began in the 1860s and ‘70s in Western Europe and the United States. “The late 19th century is really the first time people self-consciously say that they live in an interconnected age,” says Ogle. Inventions like steamships, railways, and telegraphy were making the world seem smaller, and a common way of telling time would make communication and transportation much easier. 

The idea immediately ran into one roadblock: Where would they base the clock? The Greenwich observatory was the main observatory for the entire British Empire, so, Ogle says, “suddenly this seemingly neutral, rational system” had geopolitical implications. “The French did not like that idea at all,” while India responded with anti-colonial outrage. Other nations co-opted parts of the system they thought would be useful, but had no interest in a global standard.

An equal problem was the difficulty almost everyone had with the idea of a “time” that was separated from day and night, eating, working, and sleeping. The idea of “abstract time” based on uniform units and measured by mechanical clocks had emerged in the 14th or 15th century. By the end of the 19th century it had become commonly recognized, helped by the Industrial Revolution, with its factory work and the ever-growing presence of clocks in people’s lives.  

“Everybody should have been able to understand what abstract time meant,” says Ogle. “But when I read discussions, as soon as you leave the expert level of astronomers and some diplomats, I found that it was incredibly hard for them to understand time as severed from these natural rhythms.” Even government archives and educated people “just could not wrap their minds around seeing time as essentially this grid which is grafted on the day.” They believed their physiological biorhythms of sleep and hunger and eating were unalterable, so that they wouldn’t be able to adjust to the new time.

Global time “really spread because it was appropriated and implemented as national time, initially by feeding into notions of nationalism, but essentially by helping bureaucrats with things like administrative scheduling and train schedules,” says Ogle. By the 1930s and ‘40s, most countries had nationwide mean times in accordance with the Greenwich system. Some are half an hour or even fifteen minutes off, but “they’re no longer uneven, five hours and 34 minutes.”

Ogle believes the early age of air travel, following World War II and its resulting occupations, finally pushed the system firmly into place. “It became less an idealistic, intellectual project, but something that had to do with the practical needs of globalization.” Even today, time zones bulge out or are ignored according to national borders, and in March Crimea skipped ahead two hours to go on Moscow time. For some people, at least, it is possible to turn back time.