Today… twice (Image: Nadège Mériau/Millennium Images)
Read more: “About time: Adventures in the fourth dimension“
TIME is money, so the saying goes, but these days the position of the hands on a clock face represents a good deal more than that. Clocks don’t just tell us when to get up. Thanks to our reliance on GPS, they also help keep electricity flowing, our phones connected, and ships and planes on course.
Clocks also stir up plenty of strife. In fact the simple question “What’s the time?” has become a source of passionate disagreement the world over.
Up until the 19th century, communities around the world were free to set their own local time. Then in 1876 a Scottish-born engineer called Sandford Fleming proposed standardising world time and dividing the globe into separate time zones. His concept of standard time formed the basis of the system adopted in 1884, but it took another 35 years before nations agreed a set of time zones covering the entire world. The result was 24 neat 15-degree wedges cutting smooth, longitudinal arcs down the Earth’s surface, each marking a time shift of 1 hour.
No organisation was given ultimate authority over these zones. So in the years that followed, their smooth edges were tugged out of shape to suit geopolitical and commercial interests. Nowhere have these contortions been more pronounced than at the place where the sun (technically) rises on the planet: , which runs north to south down the Pacific.
Somewhere near the equator lies Kiribati, a nation that sprawls over 33 islands. As originally drawn, the international date…
