Today, I was curious about the history of time zones. It was a passing thought, at first, until I realized I was sitting in front of the computer, and thus had easy access to the Internet, Repository of All Answers Be They True or Otherwise. I already had a pretty good idea where they came from -- namely, that some dude said, "Hey! Wouldn't it be great if we were on some sort of standardized timekeeping system?" at some point -- but there were a few points on which I was vague, as you may have noticed.

So I wandered over to Wikipedia, where I was both enlightened and shocked. It started out reasonably enough, claiming that Greenwich Mean Time was established in 1675; this squared with my idea that it had happened a long time ago. My personal divisions of history go about like this: 1980 until now is recent, 1910 until 1979 is fairly recent, 1800 to 1909 is American-level historical, 1700-1799 is regular historical, and everything before that is a long time ago. There are some further divisions, but they're mainly just adding on the word "really," so they're not worth mentioning here.

But then it went on to say that the first time zone wasn't established until 1847 -- all the way up into American-level historical times! And that was in England; America didn't get around to adopting time zones until even later, well after the advent of railroads. Until they finally agreed to all use the same time, every company ran on its own time, meaning that America has a fine tradition of making long-distance mass transit as difficult as possible. I'd always assumed that this was a recent thing that the airlines were doing, but apparently they're just carrying on the trend.

The idea of not having standardized time as recently as the 20th century baffles me. My watch is accurate to the second -- or will be, once I get back to the States; it can't sync up from here -- and, while that's obviously unnecessary, it's fun to be able to state the time with assurance. Even in the way it's formulated, it's assumed that there's only one; it's "the time," not "a time." Having to change your watch every time you go into a new town would just be weird. Of course, I suppose that you probably wouldn't have a watch, but think of the time travelers! They're having a hard enough time fitting in without people screwing with the time locally.

Apparently Chinese people felt the same way as me, only more so -- something else I didn't know is that China, massive as it is, is all in the same time zone. Not technically, of course, but in terms of timekeeping it is. This makes for a three-and-a-half hour jump in time when you cross one of the borders, and I suppose makes sunrise show up at like 2 AM on one side in the summer, but so it goes. At least the Chinese don't ever get their friends on the other side of the country calling them at 3 in the morning and pretending they forget how late it was there. Not that this is a problem that I regularly encounter, either, but I'm trying to find a silver lining here.

But seriously -- Detroit spent 18 years waffling on what time zone to belong to? The whole city was getting jet lag without ever moving. I would've thought that that would get old quickly; apparently it was a popular pastime for a generation of Detroitians, though.

Mood of the Moment: informed
Auditory Hallucination: Emmet Swimming -- 8:45