As we move our clocks forward an hour into British Summer Time, Alastair Bonnett considers the uses and abuses of one of the 19th century’s most beneficial inventions
Does time have a geography? The answer should be obvious to anyone about to travel across the English Channel: as they spin their hour hand, they join a global attempt to make sure that the Sun rises over all our mornings.
Time zones were invented in the late 19th century, and on a revolving planet, they’re essential to communication and coordination. However, they can be quirky. A glance at the world map shows that timelines are arrow-straight across most of the watery bits, but as soon as they hit land, they zig and zag, usually to ensure that people in any one country or region occupy the same temporal space.
Like every other type of border, time zones have strange stories to tell. One of the odder consequences of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 was that it shifted the peninsula to Moscow time. A ceremony was held at the main railway station in Simferopol and, as the hands of the station clock were turned from 10pm to midnight, several hundred people waved Russian flags and chanted, ‘Crimea! Russia!’ Now, Crimea is two hours ahead of the rest of Ukraine, and the other occupied areas of the country have followed suit. Political gestures of this sort are a dramatic way of declaring allegiance and schism. The rhythms of life are reoriented: Crimeans now wake and sleep in lockstep with Muscovites.
Authoritarian regimes have a penchant for fiddling with the clocks. From 2015 to 2018, North Korea adopted Pyongyang Time, creating a unique enclave half an hour behind South Korea. The state news agency KCNA announced that this was being done to signal the country’s escape from the time zone introduced by the ‘wicked Japanese imperialists’ who occupied Korea for most of the first half of the 20th century and imposed Japanese time. Pyongyang Time was claimed to reflect ‘the unshakeable faith and will of the service personnel and people on the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation’. However, this patriotic gesture undermined a wider nationalist aspiration – to unify the two Koreas – which explains why it didn’t last long.
A slightly longer-lived half-hour anomaly was visited upon Venezuela between 2007 and 2016, when the clocks also went back 30 minutes. This placed Venezuela in the select company of the few nations with fractional time zones – notably including India (+5.30) and Iran (+3.30). It wasn’t billed as a political decision. President Hugo Chávez explained that he wanted to have a ‘more fair distribution of the sunrise’. President Nicolás Maduro reversed the decision out of expediency: it had created a surge in demand for electricity during the evening and was costing the country money.
All this tinkering may seem curious, but that’s because the changes I’ve mentioned are recent or were reversed and so catch our attention. Some equally odd choices have stuck, and few now notice them. Have you ever wondered, for example, why Spain, unlike Portugal, is one hour ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, otherwise known as GMT)? Is it because Spain is to the east? Not at all. The Prime Meridian cuts through the northeast of Spain before heading off seaward – the great bulk of the country is west of London. This explains why Spain adopted UTC/GMT in 1900. Before this, cities and regions across Spain, as elsewhere in the world, kept their own time according to the position of the Sun.
So who thought it would be a great idea to move forward 60 minutes? Predictably, it was a politician. Towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, nationalist politicians decided they wanted to make a public statement of their alliance with Nazi Germany. An axis of fascist time was created. This hour leap was made national policy in 1940 by General Franco. And it stuck, its origins forgotten. Only its principal benefit is apparent: being in sync with France and the rest of western Europe.
Incidentally, the answer to the question of which country has the greatest number of time zones is France. If you include all of its far-flung overseas territories, it has 12. I admit there’s something unsatisfying about this answer. Including distant possessions would mean that the UK has nine time zones. The sensible, if not strictly accurate, answer is Russia, which has ten contiguous time zones (11 if you add the exclave of Kaliningrad).
The most curious of all the world’s curious time zones is China’s – at least when measured in terms of the number of people adversely affected. Measured from side to side, China is wider than the continental USA, which has four time zones. China has one. Between 1912 and 1949, it had five. The Communist government that came to power in 1949 was preoccupied with national unity, and it was decided that ‘one nation’ meant ‘one time’. For a country that prides itself on its pragmatism, it was – and remains – barmy.
The whole point of time zones is not to divide people up, but to unify them – to make sure that, no matter the distance, everyone is tucking into their breakfast not long after the Sun has risen. Time zones ensure commonality.
Time doesn’t work like that in China – not since 1949. Chinese time is pegged to Beijing time. This means that in the vast western regions, ‘mornings’ are long and dark. In practice, people in the far west just do everything later. People have their lunch at ‘midday’, but if they keep Beijing time, their watches will show 2pm or 3pm.
In the furthest of China’s western provinces, Xinjiang, the ‘one China, one time’ policy has taken on an ethnic dimension. Xinjiang is split between native Uighurs and Han Chinese, who’ve been settling there in large numbers over recent decades. The Sinologist Enze Han tells us that the two communities, although they share the same space, often observe a different understanding of time. Han people ‘stubbornly stick to Beijing time despite its inconveniences, to show their loyalty toward the Chinese state and their separation from the Uighurs’. One interviewee told Enze, ‘We have our own time, they have theirs, and we do not intermingle with each other.’
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It was a Scottish-Canadian engineer and polymath, Sanford Fleming, who first proposed worldwide time zones. This was in 1876, and it was one of those brilliant inventions that get ignored because it was soon taken for granted. Fleming’s idea was to imagine the world divided into 24 zones, each of which is 15° of longitude apart. Over the next few decades, his idea took off and is now one of the fundamentals of modern life.
Any system that relies on borders creates dilemmas and choices. One of the knotty problems of the new system is that it created a cliff edge: somewhere where yesterday and tomorrow are next-door neighbours. There is no better place to see this than in the Bering Strait, the icy passage that separates Alaska and the Chukchi Peninsula. It’s where Russia and the USA come within kissing distance. A mere 3.8 kilometres of freezing water separate Russia’s Big Diomede and America’s Little Diomede – islands that are commonly referred to as Yesterday and Tomorrow, because the International Date Line runs between them. If you sailed – or walked (the sea in these northern extremes does freeze over) – from the Russian to the American island, you would leap backwards one full day: you could leave at daybreak on Tuesday and the next moment be welcoming Monday morning.
Time zones make time travel a reality.
