Soonish - 5.01 This Is How You Win the Time War

5.01 | 11.04.21

Clock time is a human invention. So it shouldn’t be a box that confines us; it should be a tool that helps us accomplish the things we care about.

But consider the system of standard time, first imposed by the railroad companies in the 1880s. It constrains people who live 1,000 miles apart—on opposite edges of their time zones—to get up and go to work or go to school at the same time, even though their local sunrise and sunset times may vary by an hour or more.

And it also consigns people like me who live on the eastern edges of their time zones to ludicrously early winter sunsets.

For over a century, we've been fiddling with standard time, adding complications such as Daylight Saving Time that are meant to give us a little more evening sunlight for at least part of the year. But what if these are just palliatives for a broken system? What if it's time to reset the clock and try something completely different?

* * *

As I publish this, we’re just days away from the most discouraging, and the second most dangerous, day of the year. It's the day we return to Standard Time after eight months of Daylight Saving Time. (In 2021 that happens at 2:00 am on November 7.)

It's discouraging because twilight and sunset will arrive an hour earlier that day, erasing any lift we might have enjoyed from the theoretical extra hour of sleep the night before. It's dangerous because the shift throws off our biological clocks, just the same way a plane trip across time zones would. The only more dangerous day is the first day of Daylight Saving Time in mid-March, which always sees a wave of heart attacks and traffic accidents.

As someone who's lived at both the western and eastern extremes of my time zone, I've long been sensitive to the way differences in longitude can cut into available daylight. It's bad enough that for Bostonians like me, the sun sets long before it does for people in New York or Philadelphia or Detroit. But after the return to Standard Time, when the curtain of darkness descends yet earlier, it feels like we're living most of our lives in the dark.

Considering that all these problems are self-imposed—the by-products of a time-zone architecture introduced by scientists, government ministers, and corporate interests in the 1880s—it seems odd that we continue to tolerate them year after year. But it turns out that there are lots of people with creative ideas for changing our relationship with time. And for today's episode, I spoke with three of them: Tom Emswiler, Dick Henry, and Steve Hanke.

Should we make Daylight Saving Time permanent? Should we move the boundaries between time zones, or transplant whole regions, such as New England, into neighboring time zones? Should we consider abolishing time zones altogether and simply live according to the movements of the sun? All of these would be improvements, in my mind. Come with me on today's audio journey through the history and future of standard time, and I think you'll end up agreeing.

Mentioned In This Episode

The Constant

Long Story Short, Part 1

Long Story Short, Part 2

Long Story Short, Part 3

Amy Elliott Bragg, Why Is Michigan on Eastern Time? Thank (or Blame) Detroit, The Night Train, July 28, 2017

George L. Renaud, M.D., Early Rising in Detroit, The American Review of Reviews, Vol. 54, 1916

Tom Emswiler, Why Boston Should Defect From Its Time Zone, The Boston Globe, October 5, 2014

Report of the Special Commission on the Commonwealth’s Time Zone, November 1, 2017

H.R. 69 — Sunshine Protection Act of 2021, Congress.gov

The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar

Osea Giuntella and Fabrizio Mazzonna, Sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag: evidence from US time zone borders, The Journal of Health Economics, Vol. 65, 2019

Richard G. “Bug” Stevens, The hazards of living on the right side of a time zone border, The Conversation, May 7, 2019

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War, Gallery / Saga Press, 2020

Land of the Giants, Vox Media Podcast Network

Hub & Spoke

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

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Full Transcript

Wade Roush: You’re listening to Season 5 of Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.

I want to tell you a story about time and how we lose it and how we gain it.

That’s a topic that might be on your mind right about now. I’m releasing this on November 4, and here in the U.S. the annual switch from Daylight Saving Time back to Standard Time is coming up at 2 am on Sunday November 7. Our clocks will fall back by an hour. Which, technically, means we get an extra hour to sleep on Sunday morning. But come Sunday afternoon, we’ll pay for that extra hour, when the sun goes down an hour earlier.

There’s no more bitter reminder that Winter Is Coming.

And on top of that, this whole crazy ritual of switching our clocks twice a year has significant health costs. Especially in the spring, when the hour we lose at the beginning of Daylight Saving Time throws off our collective biological clocks enough to cause a spike in heart attacks, fatal car accidents, and even suicide.

But my story doesn’t start with winter or spring. It starts with summer.

I grew up in central Michigan in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

And every summer I’d spend a few weeks visiting my grandparents’ cottage on a lake in western Michigan.

And I remember how, in the summer my brother and I would be able to stay out swimming in the lake and goofing around until incredibly late in the evening.

From late June into early July the sun wouldn’t go down until 9:30 pm, and the twilight would last until well past 10:00.

I loved those long summer evenings. And I’d never lived or vacationed anywhere else, so I kind of thought they were normal.

But they definitely weren’t.

I found that out the hard way when I turned 18 and went off to college in the Boston area, where I still live today.

What I noticed, that very first semester of college, was that the sun goes down here in Boston about an hour earlier than it does in Michigan.

Which was annoying enough. Because who likes to get out of class or get out of work and realize it’s already dark outside?

But things got even worse in late October, which is when the nation used to switch from Daylight Saving Time back to Standard Time. So on Saturday, October 26, 1985, the sun went down at 5:45 pm. And on Sunday, October 27, it went down at 4:45 pm.

It’s hard to explain how much this bummed me out. I mean, as a college freshman it’s not like I was getting up super early. And then the sun would suddenly go down.

I was living most of my life in the dark. And that darkness kept eating into the day, because as we got into November and December, of course, the sun would go down earlier each day, until the winter solstice, when sun set at an absurdly early 4:15 pm.

I felt like I’d been kidnapped by aliens and forced to live on a planet where the days had been chopped in half.

So, what was really going on here? Why did 18-year-old me feel like it was ridiculous that sun goes down so early in Boston in the winter?

Well, I’m going to give away the answer right at the top. Because I still feel like it’s ridiculous today, and I want people to know that we could end the insanity.

The reason I felt so out of place here in Massachusetts is that I grew up in a different state that had long ago decided to give itself more daylight.

And if such a thing is possible -- if you can just vote to give yourself more daylight – then we could do it here in Boston too. We could start to see clock time for what it is: an artificial construct that we humans designed and that we can also change.

That’s the message of today’s episode.

I’ll start with a little more Michigan history.

But first we’ve got to zoom out and talk about the big stuff. Why is it that the clock time here in Massachusetts is the same as it is in Detroit or Lansing or Grand Rapids? Well, it’s because Massachusetts and Michigan are both in the Eastern Standard Time zone of North America.

Time zones have been a thing ever since the 1880s, when the railroad companies got tired of the old patchwork system where every city observed its own local time based on solar noon, the moment the sun reaches its highest point in the sky.

Solar time had kind of worked in the era of horse and stagecoach era, when nobody ever moved faster than about 20 miles per hour and you couldn’t travel far enough east or west in one day for the difference in solar noon to be a huge bother.

But in the steam age, locomotives could cover hundreds of miles in a day. And it didn’t make sense for long-distance passengers to have to adjust their pocket watches every time they pulled into a new station.

Also, the crazy quilt of different solar times was an obvious safety nightmare for railroad engineers. Because how could you know the tracks ahead would be clear if you weren’t sure all the other trains were observing the same time as you?

So in October of 1883, a bunch of railroad executives met in Chicago and decided to carve up the continental United States into four standard time zones, each separated by exactly one hour.

They imagined that the rest of the world would follow suit and create another 20 time zones circling the whole globe. Which is exactly what happened about a year later at a meeting in Washington DC called the International Meridian Conference.

That’s the same conference where everyone agreed, once and for all, that the prime meridian, zero degrees of longitude, should be the line that runs through the Greenwich Observatory outside London.

And here’s a quick side note. Like I said before, solar noon is the time when the sun is directly overhead at your line of longitude. So in a way time and longitude are just two ways of talking about the same thing.

And if you’re interested in the history of that connection, and how it turned out to be impossible to measure longitude until we knew how to accurately measure time, then I highly recommend you listen to an epic three-part podcast episode that my friend Mark Chrisler just published over at The Constant. It’s one of the other podcasts here at Hub & Spoke. The series you want to look for is called Long Story Short and you can find it at constantpodcast.com.

Now, when you divide 360 degrees of longitude into 24 slices, one for each hour, then in theory each time zone winds up being 15 degrees wide.

The Eastern time zone is five time zones west of the prime meridian in Greenwich, England. That means Eastern time is centered on 75 degrees west longitude, a line that runs roughly through Philadelphia. So in theory, Eastern Time should mean the slice of the earth’s surface all the way from 67.5 degrees west to 82.5 degrees west.

But wait! Almost the entire state of Michigan lies west of 82.5 degrees longitude.

Which means that by all rights the state should be in the Central Time zone.

And in fact, when the railroads drew the boundaries between time zones in 1883, Michigan was in Central Time. And it stayed there until 1915.

But here’s the remarkable part of the story.

Michigan might still be on Central time today if it weren’t for a man who lived in Detroit named Dr. George Renaud.

Dr. Renaud was the founder of the More Daylight Club, which at its outset in 1907 had a grand total of two members.

So what was the purpose of the More Daylight Club? Well, it was right there in the name. Dr. Renaud didn’t like it when the sun went down before 5 pm in the winter and before 9 pm in the summer. He figured that if Detroit could just observe Eastern Standard Time, like its sister city of Windsor Ontario right across the river, then everybody would get to enjoy more daylight hours in the evening.

Keep in mind, this was before the invention of Daylight Saving Time, which is a whole different kettle of fish. Renaud had his own charming name for the concept. He called it “Fast Time.”

Here’s how Renaud described it later, in an article that appeared in 1916 in The American Review of Reviews.

Voice of George Renaud: The agitation for Eastern Standard Time was an effort to recover several hundred hours yearly of daylight that were lost in the early morning hours, before arising, and utilizing them at the end of the day for purposes of recreation, outdoor living, health, et cetera. The scheme is based upon the fact that our habits are regulated largely by the clock. Under Central Standard Time, during nine or ten months of the year the sun was shining from one to several hours each morning while we were asleep, while darkness rapidly approached soon after the end of the day’s work. If the advantages of recovering much of this waste of daylight, there can be no argument. As to the method of doing so, the adoption of a fast time offers the only logical, feasible, and practical method for a community.

Wade Roush: At first everybody thought the More Daylight Club’s idea was…pretty dimwitted. When Renaud organized a city-wide ballot initiative in 1908, he lost in all 150 precincts.

But the club gradually found more supporters, including downtown retailers, who had visions of consumers strolling and shopping for an extra hour.

By 1915 Renaud was able to convince a majority of the Detroit City Council to defect from Central time and join Eastern Time.
Later, other Michigan cities like Lansing and Grand Rapids followed Detroit’s lead.

And in 1931 the state legislature moved the whole state into Eastern time, except for a few counties of the Upper Peninsula that really ought to be part of Wisconsin anyway.

So, to bring this all home: The reason I grew up thinking that gloriously late sunsets were normal was that I was born in a state that had been on the eastern edge of the Central time zone, but then decided to be on the western edge of the Eastern time zone.

And I didn’t know it then, but I had Dr. Renaud and the More Daylight Club to thank for it.

And I also didn’t know it then, but when I moved from Michigan to Massachusetts, it was like giving away that gift from Dr. Renaud.

Now I live in a place that’s close to the eastern edge of its time zone.

Which means we Bostonians give up a lot of daylight. If you live in Philadelphia, at the center of the Eastern time zone, you get an extra 20 minutes of daylight compared to Boston.

Now, if Michigan could transplant itself from Central Time into Eastern Time back in the nineteen-teens, couldn’t Boston defect from Eastern time today and join the next time zone over?

The answer is yes, it absolutely could.

In fact, there’s a bill pending in the state legislature right now that would do exactly that. In coordination with similar legislation in Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, it would put most of New England into Atlantic Standard Time, where we’d join the Maritime Provinces of Canada .

And now I want you to meet the man behind that bill. I think of him as the Dr. George Renaud of our time.

Tom Emswiler: So my name is Tom Emswiler. I live in Quincy, Massachusetts, where I've lived for the last 10 years. I'm originally from Virginia.

Wade Roush: Specifically, Tom grew up in the DC suburbs in northern Virginia. He went to James Madison University in the Shenandoah Valley. After college he worked for a while as a legislative aide to a member of Congress. And then he got a graduate degree in health administration.

Tom Emswiler: And then I moved up to the Boston area in 2011 to do health care stuff.…I knew that I was moving north, but I had no idea how far I was moving east. So you can imagine my horror, my first December in New England, and I had the Sun setting at 4:11 p.m., which I consider the daytime, not the nighttime. And I thought to myself, there has to be a better way.

As a legislative aide Emswiler learned the art of writing op-eds, mostly about health care and the federal budget. But one summer night in 2014, after he’d put his kids to bed, he sat down at the computer and wrote a very different kind of piece.

Tom Emswiler: This thing poured out of me this idea that, gosh, maybe we're in the wrong time zone altogether, because we're hanging out in the ocean. Meanwhile, you have like, you know, … Pennsylvania kind of in the middle of the Eastern Time zone. So I thought to myself, what if we really should be in the Atlantic time zone?

Wade Roush: Emswiler submitted his argument to the Boston Globe. And he was pretty sure they’d say no thanks, that’s a dimwitted idea. But the paper actually published it, in the Sunday edition no less.

Tom Emswiler: It was on page K5 or whatever. And then something funny happened, which is people actually read it, which was a fun surprise. And it was, you know, it was like the top two or three read story up through, like Wednesday of that week. So it was it was lots of views, which was awesome.

Wade Roush: Readers of the Globe got into flame wars over Emswiler’s idea in the paper’s comment section. And he even got asked to do a TV interview with the local meteorologist on Boston’s Channel 4.

After that 15 minutes of fame, most people would just go back to their normal lives. But Emswiler’s op-ed had struck a nerve.

Emswiler saw a chance to convert his idea into action. And he happened to know that in Massachusetts there’s a thing called a Bill By Request, where any constituent can submit a bill for the consideration of legislators. So he wrote up a bill describing this idea for transplanting Massachusetts into Atlantic Standard Time and calling for an official study of the idea.

And lo and behold, two state senators, including the senate president, liked Emswiler’s bill by request. They picked it up and inserted it into a larger economic development bill.

Tom Emswiler: [And so this is 2016, summer 2016, and it made it through. The governor has the governor has line item veto for spending, but also for like non-spending. So the governor could have taken it out and I think chose to just leave it alone. And so my little bill that could became law, only a year or so after I filed it.

Wade Roush: The new study commission had 11 people on it, including Emswiler. And he says they spent most of 2017 holding public hearings and writing up their findings.

Tom Emswiler: And so November 1st, 2017, we produced our report and that report endorsed by the committee on a vote of nine to one with one absent. We endorsed…moving thoughtfully as a region…to year-round Atlantic Time.

Wade Roush: Now, this shift isn’t as radical as it might sound. After all, from mid-March to early November, when most of the United States is on Daylight Saving Time, the East Coast is already on the same time as Atlantic Standard Time.

Tom Emswiler: So it's the same time we have now, except instead of eight months a year, it'd be 12 months a year. And so then after that, I had to wait for the next legislative session to start. But in, I guess, January 2019, we submitted a bill to actually make the move and said if. If this bill passes, this means Massachusetts wants to make the move, and once we have. Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island together, the four of us will go to the US Department of Transportation, who handles time zones and say, we want to have this. We want to move time zones, so we're in the same time year-round. So in in 2019, I believe, a similar bill passed both houses of the Maine Legislature and it passed the New Hampshire House.

Wade Roush: And that, unfortunately, was where Emswiler’s luck ran out.

Tom Emswiler: It did have a hearing in Massachusetts. And by hearing. They do these smaller, less important bills en masse, and so there was a bunch of people lined up to testify about a bunch of different bills. And I was there, I think, by myself and I read my little statement. They have a Death Star clock counting down your three minutes. And so I had practiced and so I read my script. There were no questions. My bill was not acted on. And you know, that's how a bill does not become a law.

Wade Roush: Emswiler and his supporters refiled the bill at the start of the following legislative session in January of 2021.

Tom Emswiler: And so I have not heard anything. I imagine they will have some sort of hearing this fall. So that's where we are.

Wade Roush: Emswiler isn’t sure why the bill seems to be stalled in the State House right now. He says almost everybody he talks to seems to like the idea.

The only group that’s ever raised serious objections to the plan is the radio and TV broadcasting industry. Their problem with it is that they have to work around the live network feeds out of New York, which means that for four months out of the year, when Atlantic Standard Time and Eastern Standard Time are actually an hour apart, the morning news shows and the late-night talk shows would air an hour later, and people might decide not to watch them.

Tom Emswiler: I think a lot of people base their sleep schedule on what they want to watch on television at night…Now I'll give you one guess who doesn't want people to go to bed an hour early and stop watching television? Can you tell me who you think it is?

Wade Roush: Gee, could it possibly be The National Association of Broadcasters?

Tom Emswiler: Right. They want eyeballs on their advertisements for 409 and Cheerios.

Wade Roush: So that’s a battle of the TV schedules is one that Emswiler hasn’t figured out how to fight. But he is encouraged by the fact that Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey is part of a bipartisan group of senators who’ve introduced a related proposal called the Sunshine Protection Act.

If that act became law, it would make Daylight Saving Time permanent across the nation. We’d stop switching our clocks back and forth. It would be like moving the entire country one time zone to the east. So in that sense, it would do exactly the same thing as Emswiler’s proposal.

Wade Roush: Would you be equally happy with both of those alternatives? Because they accomplish the same thing, It's just a different way of framing it, right? So do you think the framing matters?

Tom Emswiler: I mean, it doesn't matter to me. I just want the outcome. I think when you're talking about a local move, you have to think about moving time zones. What has more momentum over the last two years or so is a national conversation to stay on Daylight Time year round… And that would be fine with me too.

Wade Roush: That would amount to an admission that we misplaced all of the time zones, basically that we're agreeing as a country that we're going to shift the whole country one time zone to the East because the ones that the railroads created in the 1880s just don't work for us anymore, right?

Tom Emswiler: I mean, ideally, yeah, that's the thing, because before the railroads, everyone just would look up and say, Is it noon yet? Right? …Solar noon is different at every point on the globe, right? So you could either have one time zone like China, but that I don't think it's popular. So then you could have time zones. And if you're going to have time zones, what makes the most sense for how we live now? And most people, for better or for worse, summer time fits more with their work, sleep, entertainment, family schedules.

Wade Roush: Ok. I'd like to do a little game show here. I went through all of the comments that people left on your Globe article, and there are 164 of them. And I tried to boil them down into categories and kind of combine comments together that that were similar to each other. So I have a list of summary objections to your idea, and I wondered if it might be fun to kind of run through them and ask you to respond quickly, sort of in a lightning round style. We don’t need to spend an hour on this, but I’d love to hear your quick answers.

Tom Emswiler: Sure.

Wade Roush: Ok, so the first one and really the most common one was…if the sunrise was later, kids would be going to school in the dark, in the middle of the winter. What's your reaction to that?

Tom Emswiler: As someone with two small children, nothing is more important to me than the safety of our kids. The American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a study a few years ago called Let Them Sleep, saying that no school should start before 8:30. 8:30 is well after a late Atlantic Time sunrise, which would be about 8:14.

Wade Roush: Ok, that's a good answer. Some people just genuinely seem to prefer sunshine in the morning to sunshine in the evening.

Tom Emswiler: Yep, it's personal preference. Some people like to jog. Some people like to take walks after dinner. I guess there's two different types of folks. Totally personal preference. I'd rather not lose the first 45 minutes of daylight while I'm sleeping, as opposed to being raking leaves in the dark at 4:55.

Wade Roush: A couple of people said that the surrounding states would never go along, that it would be too hard to get New Hampshire and Maine and Rhode Island and Massachusetts to act together on anything, and therefore the idea is a non-starter.

Tom Emswiler: Those other states are waiting for us.

Wade Roush: Ok, cool. A more cynical person said politicians in general will never be able to get their act together since they live on a different planet and they can't do anything useful. That's a somewhat jaded response, I guess, right?

Tom Emswiler: Yeah, I mean, I think that's an argument for…a ballot initiative, right? Where we check the box, yes or no. Yeah, I think that would be great. I think if we had a ballot initiative, it would pass and it would be a done deal, at least the Massachusetts part….But I think it's right that the Legislature is very cautious and it's going to need to be overwhelming to get them to move.

Wade Roush: Ok. Here's another con. It would be too disruptive to business if Boston were on a different time zone from New York…I guess that that's the argument that goes all the way back to the 1880s that New York is sort of the financial heart of the eastern seaboard. And therefore we should all be on New York time. Which, Eastern time basically is New York time.

Tom Emswiler: Sure, yeah. That is a valid point. It doesn’t affect Boston. I think theProvidence, Boston, Manchester, Portland mega metro area doesn't need to worry about New York. I think folks in Connecticut might want to make their own decision. There's a bill in the Connecticut Legislature to join us. Most people I talked to in Connecticut hate the shift and would be happy to come along. But I take the point that people who, you know, get on at the Stamford station and take the train down, you know, to New York City might want to be on the same time as New York, but that's a conversation for Connecticut.

Wade Roush: Ok. There was another group of commenters who felt that if you're going to mess with time, the only acceptable change would be to abolish summer time and go back to Standard Time year round so that we could quote, “Experience time as our forefathers did.”

Tom Emswiler: Sure. Again, right now in summer, the sun rises at five o'clock on Standard Time, the sun will rise at four a.m., which means it would get light at 3:30 a.m I think that is too early. People are binging Netflix past 8 o’clokc. So no one wants to get up at 3:30. Almost no one.

Wade Roush: Yeah, yeah, it's a good point. Ok, and finally, this whole question about time zones is really unimportant, and people who think about it aren't being very serious and should just find something more important to worry about and/or just get it over with and move to their time zone of choice if it's so important to them.

Tom Emswiler: Let's do it.

Wade Roush: I mean, you know, you want all of us to move to our time zone of choice.

Tom Emswiler: Right.

Wade Roush: But you're not moving to Newfoundland, right?

Tom Emswiler: Right. I’m very popular with the Canadian Maritime press, by the way. I’ve done several interviews with their radio stations.

Wade Roush: Now if we really want more choice in how we relate to time and how we adapt to the movements of the sun, there’s something else we could do that would be even more radical than switching time zones.

And that would be to abolish time zones altogether and live according to whatever schedule suits us .

And next I’m gonna introduce you to two scholars at Johns Hopkins University who think we should do exactly that.

Right after this break.

[musical interlude]

Wade Roush: So this is the part where I usually stop and invite listeners to support Soonish by donating on Patreon. If you like the show, and you want to help keep it going, I hope you’ll visit patreon.com/soonish and sign up to make a per-episode donation. At the $5 per episode level you’ll be joining an exclusive group that gets early access to every new episode of the show. And at the $10 per episode level, I’ll also send you the Soonish coffee mug. You can check out all of our rewards and become a supporter at patreon.com/soonish.

Thanks, and now back to today’s episode.

[musical interlude]

Dick Henry: I was born 81 years ago in Toronto, Canada.

Wade Roush: That’s Professor Richard Henry.

Dick Henry: Growing up, I was a junior astronomer and I managed to get into the University of Toronto and got my degree in astronomy, actually. And then I came to the United States, to Princeton to get my Ph.D. and then subsequently I was at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. And I've spent the bulk of my career here at the wonderful Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Wade Roush: Professor Henry and a colleague of his from Johns Hopkins have a big idea about how we should manage clock time. But to get there, first we need to talk about calendars.

Wade Roush: Every summer Professor Henry used to teach a four-week course about stars, for astronomy beginners.

Dick Henry: And it was basically the same every time. It's an elementary astronomy course, what's what's going to change? I kept it up to date, of course, but it was so annoying to me that the handout that I gave to the kids had to be changed each year simply because the stupid calendar changed from year to year.

Wade Roush: Say the course started on the third Monday in June. The problem was that every year the third Monday would fall on a different date, so Professor Henry would have to reprint the syllabus.

Dick Henry: And I said to myself at one point, I'm a scientist, can I not possibly figure out a way we can avoid this? And I quickly discovered that it had been considered before, and it would be easy to avoid it. And the answer was there. A n intercalary. Instead of February 29, have an extra week every five or six years.

Wade Roush: So to reiterate , what Professor Henry is saying is that it would be easy to create a permanent calendar where every year is the same. January 1st would always be a Monday, and August 1st would always be a Wednesday, and so forth.

To make it work we’d have to declare that a calendar year is 364 days long, or exactly 52 weeks of 7 days each.

But of course an astronomical year isn’t 364 days, it’s 365.24 days. That’s why we insert a leap day, February 29, every four years, to keep the calendar from drifting too far away from the seasons. Except in years divisible by 100, in which case we don’t insert a leap day. Unless those century years are divisible by 400, in which case we do insert a leap day. It’s all very very confusing.

Henry’s proposal is that we get rid of leap days and leap years entirely. In their place, every five or six years we would insert a mini-month that’s exactly 7 days long.

This intercalary month would fall after December 31st and before January 1st. Henry proposes that we call the mini-month Xtra or just X.

So far, so good. Though exactly how you’d get everybody on board with that kind of change is beyond me.

But Professor Henry’s next thought was, if you’re going to create this beautiful permanent calendar, why not fix the clock too, so that the time and the date a re always the same everywhere on Earth.

In our current system it can be two different days at the same time, which is just…weird. Say you’re in Los Angeles and it’s 3 in the afternoon on Friday November 5th. Well, in Sydney, Australia, it’s already 9 in the morning on Saturday November 6th.

Or say you’re on a boat in the Pacific and you sail west across the International Date Line. Suddenly it’s one day later. It’s goofy and it gives you a headache just thinking about it. But it’s the only way to run things when you have a system of 24 time zones.

The obvious way to end the headache would be to get rid of time zones altogether and instead declare that there’s only one global time.

That time would be Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. Also known as Greenwich Mean Time. Also known as Zulu time.

So, Professor Henry started talking up his idea. But like Dr. George Renaud back in the early days of the More Daylight Club, he didn’t make much progress at first.

Dick Henry: And so I started laboring away on that and I getting nowhere. And I happened to mention it to a great economist at lunch, Steve Hanke. And he said, Dick, this is a revolutionary idea. It would make all the difference to the profits of corporations and blah blah blah blah blah. And I said, Well, that's great, Steve. But I've been totally unable to implement it. And so he said, What did you say, Steve? I'll implement it. Well, anyway, we've been working on it ever since….And the 24- hour time is just part of the whole thing. It's one package…It all make sense and call us globalists. All right. Some people call that a pejorative term. I think it's a wonderful term. I'm a globalist.

Wade Roush: Dick Henry’s fellow globalist is Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins. He’s a world expert on currency reform, and he’s helped a bunch of countries to relaunch their own currencies, including Argentina, Estonia, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ecuador, Lithuania, and Montenegro. And you know how the old saying goes: time is money.

Steve Hanke: Dick, once he did introduce me to his thinking about the permanent calendar and then we got into Universal Time, we actually taught a joint seminar together on the calendar and time and had a group of Hopkins undergraduates working on these problems….They were focused mainly on the economic costs of these ad hoc, really arbitrary aspects, particularly of time. I mean, as you mentioned, Wade, we didn't even have time zones one hundred and fifty years ago, this is a completely arbitrary thing. And you would think logically, well, OK, if you wanted an artificial time zones, you'd have 24, you know, one per hour. Well, no, we have 39 and they are a hodgepodge. They don't even click at the hour, all of them. Some click at the 30-minute point. North Korea and Nepal clicks at the 45-minute point. And then summer time, that oddity crept in…around a hundred years ago. The Germans, of course, put that in. Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, we get a we get a dose of jetlag without even going any place…And Dick and I have argued that Coordinated Universal Time or UTC or Greenwich mean time, Zulu Time, whatever you want to call it, should be every place…

Wade Roush: A quick side note: since Universal time is built around the zero hour in Greenwich, or Z, it’s also known as by the NATO phonetic alphabet word for Z, which is Zulu.

Steve Hanke: I think, Dick, the best thing—you mentioned globalists. We should just call this Earth Time. Because Dick likes to point out as an astrophysicist that the time is literally the same every place on Earth. The thing that's artificial is the fact that we've got these damn watches and clocks in which somebody imposes an artificial setting on us. Instead of all being set at the same time, they're set at a variety of times. Thirty nine, to be exact.

Wade Roush: Professor Henry and Professor Hanke call their package of calendar and time reforms the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar. You can read all the details at hankehenryontime.com.

Now, historically it’s really hard to get everyone to change their calendars, as evidenced by the fact that we haven’t done it since 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII abolished the old Julian calendar.

Our current Gregorian calendar isn’t perfect. But speaking for myself, I’m not sure that the confusion over which day of the week falls on which day of the year is bad enough to motivate the world to switch to a different system.

But the tangle of time zones is a completely different matter. To Professor Hanke, the economist, that system has real costs that we have to deal with every day.

One of the reasons Hanke thinks civilians will eventually switch to a single worldwide time zone is that in sectors of the economy where everyone needs to agree what time it is, they’ve already done it.

Steve Hanke: You had pilots going to Zulu time in the mid-70s. It's a matter of time and distance. The faster things go, that is when the logic of time zones gets destroyed.

Wade Roush: You can think about it this way. Once railroad locomotives could go faster than horses, we had to let go of solar time.

Now a Boeing 787 can travel from Tahiti to Paris in 16 hours and cross 12 time zones along the way.

A digital packet on the Internet can travel all the way around the world in under one second.

So maybe we need to put aside the idea of local time altogether.

Steve Hanke: All economic transactions have to be done in Universal Time, otherwise it gets very confusing. When did I buy gold in Mumbai? What time zone was the time stamp in?...Can you imagine, if you weren't using Universal Time? There'd be so many lawsuits about when you actually bought something and what the price actually was supposed to be. And then you've got computers, of course, and GPS and all these things. Everything is on Universal Time. So this is happening spontaneously without Hanke and Henry uttering a word about the thing. We are winning that battle without even doing anything. So…we think Universal Time, it really is right around the corner.

Wade Roush: Okay, so far I’ve been talking about the logic behind a permanent calendar with only one global time zone. But I haven’t asked how it would feel to actually live that way.

And I haven’t talked about how it would help solve the pet peeve that got me started on all this, which is that here in Boston we’re stuck with ridiculously early sunsets.

So here’s how it all ties together.

In a world where everyone observes the same time, everybody can go back to running their lives around local daylight hours.

So, for example, on October 30, the day I’m recording these words, the sun would rise here in Boston at about 12:15 Universal time. I’d probably get up a little before that, at 11:30. I’d walk the dog and have breakfast and sit down to work around 13:00.

I’d break for lunch around 16:30. The sun would set about six hours later, at 22:40. I’d quit work around that time and then I’d have dinner at Zero hundred hours, at which point the calendar would flip over to the next day. And I’d go to bed around 04:00.

People in San Francisco would do all the same things, but about three hours later. They’d get up around 14:30, they’d eat lunch around 19:30, the sun would go down for them at 02:12, and they’d go to bed around 07:00.

But their actual routines would be up to them. The point is, people in every part of the world would be free to adopt a schedule that makes the best use of the sunlight available in their location.

No more raking leaves in the dark. No more switching back and forth between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time. No more little pocket time zones where the clocks are 15 minutes off or 30 minutes off the rest of the world.

Before we finish talking about Universal time, I want to mention one more benefit to getting rid of time zones.

So remember how I started this podcast about 20 hours ago talking about those late summer sunsets I loved so much when as a kid? Well, it seems that life on the outer rim of a time zone may be hazardous for your health.

Steve Hanke: There are huge health costs associated with…being at the border of a time zone like you were out in Michigan, going to bed too late. People are overweight. More people have diabetes. There are all kinds of health problems associated with that.

Wade Roush: What Professor Hanke is referring to is a study that came out in 2019 by a pair of health economists named Osea Giuntella and Fabrizio Mazzonna.

It was a brilliant paper in that it used the existence of boundaries between time zones as the basis for a kind of natural experiment.

If you control for everything else, do people living on the right side of the boundary have better or worse health and economic outcomes than people on the left side?

The hypothesis Giuntella and Mazzonna went in with was that people on the right side of a boundary – in other words, people who live on the far western edge of their time zones — end up getting less sleep.

That’s because they stay up later to enjoy those late sunsets, but they don’t make up for it the next morning by sleeping longer, because they’re still on the same work and social schedules as everyone else in their time zone.

And the hypothesis turned out to be true, with some pretty devastating consequences.

People on the western edge of a time zone get 19 minutes less sleep on average and have significantly higher rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and breast cancer. They even have lower per capita income, thanks to lost productivity.

Steve Hanke: If you look at the peer reviewed journals in health, there is a lot of economic evidence that the cost of having time zones is very significant now. So it's better to use the Universal Time and do what we've done for millennia. And that is, just follow the sun.

Wade Roush: At this point I need to acknowledge that there is one place in the world that has already abolished time zones. And it’s not working out so great for everyone.

Wade Roush: [I wanted to ask you about China, where even though the country is about four time zones wide…The central government wants everyone to regulate their businesses and their schools and their activities according to Beijing time, which means a lot of people on the western side of the country wind up getting up super early, way before the sun comes up. And that seems like a counterexample. I mean, that's a case where you've got this this national time, but you don't have the flexibility to go along with it that that would allow people to regulate their lives according to their…natural solar rhythms. So how do you think about the China example?

Dick Henry: I consider it an example of the worst features of both.…it's grotesque, and I'm very confident that in fact, the people on the extreme east and west of the whole thing simply readjust themselves regardless. Of course, when Beijing is speaking, they're speaking on their time.

Wade Roush: I've read as well that there is an unofficial sort of Muslim time or Uighur time among people on the far western side of China. But that if you overtly sort of go about your life, you know, or if you're watch, you know, is set to Uighur time, you could actually get penalized for that.

Dick Henry: Yeah, I suppose I n England, for example, there are still people who are going to a pub in order a pint, right?

Wade Roush: Right. You don't get arrested for that, but you might be arrested in China for having some time other than Beijing time on your watch.

Dick Henry: It's very possible. And it's disgusting.

Steve Hanke: I think if you had freedom, if you weren't in China with an authoritarian regime, I think things would naturally evolve as they were over a hundred and fifty years ago. It would be more much more oriented towards solar.

Wade Roush: So you think there would be more room for variety, flexibility and local choice?

Steve Hanke: Yes.

Wade Roush: I did ask Tom Emswiler about Hanke and Henry’s solution to the whole problem of time zones.

Tom Emswiler: It's an interesting idea, and I was aware that air traffic control uses UTC. I don't know that people would go for it. I think it would be weird to have dinner tomorrow. You know, I think that might be too much for people to adjust to…I mean, the change I have proposed is so mild and it's about to turn 10 years old and…it's not moving anywhere…I proposed doing nothing eight months of the year. It’s so incredibly minor compared to the Hopkins idea . I mean, it seems like 80 percent of the people in Massachusetts are behind my idea, and that still doesn't. Still, not not good enough. And I think that this idea would probably get less support than that.

Wade Roush: I wanted to end with a couple more kind of personal questions, I guess, or philosophical questions. So. So one is like, how do you imagine…it would affect you and your family if this if this goal were accomplished, if we did switch to Atlantic time or year-round daylight time? How would your life be better?

Tom Emswiler: Well, how would it be different? It'd be very minimal. It'd be like walking into a room and saying to yourself, …this temperature in this room is great. You know, you don't notice that, you know, you only notice if it's if it's too hot or too cold. If it's the right temperature, you don't, you don't remark it to yourself, right? So I think instead of looking up at the December sky and saying, Oh, I can't believe it's three and I can't even see the sun that's behind the trees already. You know, we would end our day and not really notice anything. We'd notice very gradual change in the Sun setting earlier, but … it wouldn't be so stark and dark. rI do think it'd be a minimal change. I think it would be better if we didn't have spring forward. When everyone gets jet lag, I think we'd get we wouldn't lose any sleep in the spring and we wouldn't have the stark change in the fall. But I do think it'd be something that we wouldn't really notice too much.

Wade Roush: You've been working on this and thinking about this and writing about this for almost a decade. Have you developed kind of a philosophy about the human relationship to time? And maybe I should give you some context. I mean, my own point of view from having thought about this…. you know, I was I wrote a research paper when I was an undergrad about the invention of Standard Time. And so I had to kind of dig out the whole history of the railroads and why it was important to them to get on a coordinated time system. And it was really important because you couldn't have trains running on the same tracks. At the same time, you needed to know what time it was right. But you know, that was one hundred and fifty years ago, and I feel like clock time is supposed to be a convenience. It's supposed to be a tool. It's not supposed to be a straitjacket. And it shouldn't be a big surprise if a system we created in the 1880s, you know, doesn't serve us well anymore, and we should be ready and willing and able to alter it to suit modern needs if that's the right thing to do, since time is fundamentally arbitrary to begin with .

Tom Emswiler: Yeah, it's an interesting thought. I do think having some guideposts is good, but we shouldn't let time boss us around. You know what I mean? We should be in charge of it, not our television shows or anything else. It's never a bad idea to take a step back and think to yourself, is this is how I want to live my life? Especially as you have life changes, you know, if you have small children, you might want to do one thing. If you're an empty nester, you might want to do something else. Or if you don't have children, you might want to do something different. So it's always a good idea to step back and reflect.

Wade Roush: Out of all the time and calendar reforms we’ve been talking about, I think the one that’s most likely to come to pass here in the U.S. is the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make Daylight Saving Time permanent.

I’d be happy with that, because it would make those winter months a little less dark and gloomy here in New England.

But in the end I think there are some other shifts happening in the way we relate to time that may end up being just as important.

One is the mobile device revolution. Now we all have supercomputers in our pockets or on our wrists that stay synchronized to the microsecond because they’re all tied into government-run atomic clocks. On top of that our phones and watches can show us at a glance what time it is in Boulder Bangalore or Beijing and whether it’s daylight or nighttime in those places. So in effect we’re able to stop thinking about time so much and leave it to our devices.

That’s bolstered by a second change, which is the Zoom revolution. Every day we’re having fewer spontaneous phone calls and more appointment-based video conferences with people in other cities or countries or continents. Zoom bridges distance and gives us a little window into one another’s lives, as if we were all living in different rooms inside one giant house. In reality some of those rooms are in different time zones. But at least we don’t have to figure out the time differences, because Zoom knows where everybody lives and it can put the correct appointments straight into our calendars.

And then there’s the even bigger change that Zoom enabled, which is the whole work-from-home revolution. It started out during the pandemic as a public health necessity. But then we realized that working from home pries us all loose from all the office and commuting routines that we never really liked anyway. When you manage your own schedule, you can use the daylight hours anyway you want.

I guess I think Steve Hanke is right. We’re winning the time war without even doing anything, because even 200 years after the invention of the steam locomotive, speed and connectivity keep erasing distance.

When many minds meet up in virtual places, it doesn’t matter where anybody’s physical body happens to be located. We’re all living in the infinite present of cyber time.

And then when we turn off our gadgets, we’re back on our own time. We can go outside and greet the sun and ride it all the way to the late summer twilight.

[musical interlude]

Wade Roush: Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush.

Graham Gordon Ramsay wrote our intro theme, and Titlecard Music and Sound provided all of the additional music. Mark Chrisler from The Constant played the voice of Dr. George Renaud.

We’re on Twitter at soonishpodcast, and at our website, soonishpodcast.org, there’s transcript of this episode and links to more resources about time and time zones.

If you didn’t catch it already, I want to note that the title of this episode is an allusion to an amazing story called This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novella in 2019 and the Hugo Award for best novella in 2020. I’m generally not a fan of time travel stories but this one is exquisite and I highly recommend it.

Speaking of recommendations: Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a nonprofit collective of indie producers making some of the smartest audio stories out there.

And this week I want to recommend something new from producer Matt Frassica. Matt is the creator and host of a Hub & Spoke called The Briny. It’s all about the oceans. And it’s terrific. But lately Matt has also been producing a show called Land of the Giants, from Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

The current season of Land of the Giants is all about Apple, and how it rose and fell and rose again to the point that it’s now the world’s most valuable company. The storytelling hits all the key points, the interviews are compelling, the narration by host Peter Kafka is mesmerizing, and overall I’m just super impressed by the work Matt did to pull it all together. So go check out Land of the Giants, available wherever you get your podcasts.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back with some new episodes… Soonish.

5.01 This Is How You Win the Time War

5.01 | 11.04.21

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