Who Decided What Time It Is

Nobody has ever seen time. You have seen clocks, sunsets, birthdays, and countdown timers, but time itself stays invisible while quietly controlling when we wake up, eat, commute, meet friends, and fall asleep. That mystery sent me down a rabbit hole that starts with a simple question: who decided what time it is, and how did the whole world end up agreeing on the same numbers?

We trace the history of timekeeping from the moment humans first realized the sky wasn’t random. Farmers needed seasons they could trust, not exact minutes, and ancient observers learned to read patterns in the Sun, Moon, and stars. In Egypt, the reappearance of Sirius helped predict the Nile flood. In Babylon, a practical obsession with the number 60 helped shape the way we still divide hours and minutes. From there, the story moves from nature to machines: water clocks that “just leaked,” pendulum clocks that made accuracy feel normal, and early portable watches that let time travel in a pocket.

Then the stakes turn deadly and global. At sea, longitude is a time problem, and John Harrison’s marine chronometer changes navigation forever. On land, railroads force the invention of standardized time zones, including the surreal “day of two noons” in 1883. We jump forward to quartz and atomic clocks and how ultra-precise timekeeping powers GPS, the internet, aviation, and modern medicine, even when we don’t notice it.

And because human beings can’t resist making things weird, we also hit the strange side quests: Sweden’s one-time February 30th, France’s 10-hour day, why snooze became nine minutes, why clocks turn clockwise, what Big Ben actually is, and why daylight saving time isn’t a farmer story. If you like history, science, and the hidden logic behind everyday life, you’ll leave seeing your watch differently. Subscribe for more rabbit holes, share this with a friend who loves odd history, and leave a review with the most surprising time fact you learned.

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Transcript

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Time Is Invisible But Rules Us

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know what's strange? Nobody has ever seen time. Not once. You've seen clocks, you've watched sunsets, you've celebrated birthdays. You've probably looked at your phone a dozen times today. But time itself, it's invisible. And somehow this invisible thing controls almost every part of our lives. It tells us when to wake up, when to eat, when to sleep. It can make a single minute feel like an hour. Or it can let an entire year disappear before you realize it. A few nights ago, I started wondering something. Who decided what time it is? Seriously. Why are there 60 seconds in a minute? Why 24 hours in a day? Who looked at the sky and convinced the rest of the world to agree? I thought those answers would be simple. Turns out they weren't. What I found instead was a story filled with ancient astronomers, stubborn kings, desperate sailors, brilliant scientists, and one meeting that changed the entire world. So, come join me down this rabbit hole, and we'll start with a question that seems almost too simple to ask. What is time? Sometimes that's a terrible idea. Because one question turns into another, and before I know it, it's two o'clock in the morning, and I've somehow gone from wondering how a clock works to reading about ancient astronomers, shipwrecks, and a guy who spent years trying to solve a mystery that nobody else could figure out. That's kind of how my brain works. And honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. Every week I invite you to come along with me to chase any kind of rabbit hole. We'll find out. We'll meet fascinating people from history, discover the strange twists that help shape our world, untangle a little science, and uncover stories hiding behind things we've walked past a thousand times without a second thought. Because the more I learn, the more convinced I'll become that almost nothing is ordinary once you know the story behind it. So come along with me, maybe keep a notebook nearby, and let's go down this rabbit hole.

Who Picked 24 Hours Anyway

SPEAKER_00 3:07

So, can I tell you what started this whole rabbit hole in the first place? It wasn't like a big philosophical question. I wasn't lying awake wondering about the nature of time. I was just sitting in my office. I looked up at the clock, and for whatever reason, my brain asked a question I'd somehow never really asked it before. I didn't ask what time it is, but who decided what time it is? Seriously, who was the first person to say there are 24 hours in a day? Why 60 minutes? Why 60 seconds? And maybe the strangest question of all, who convinced everyone else to go along with it just because they thought it worked? I'd looked at clocks my entire life. Like I collect watches. And my whole life I've never really thought of that question. I've looked at all of my watches, my phone, the dashboard in my car, the microwave a hundred times a day. And somehow I'd never stopped to wonder where any of those numbers come from. At first, I figured this would be an easy answer. I thought I'd find one inventor or one civilization or one genius who figured it all out. Instead, I found thousands of years of people arguing, experimenting, observing the sky. They got things wrong. They tried again and again, and then slowly they built the system that we still use today. That surprised me because I realized something I'd never really thought about before. Time and keeping time aren't the same thing. Time doesn't need us. The earth is going to keep spinning no matter what we do, whether we own a watch or not. The sun is going to rise whether anybody checks the clock. So keeping time, though, that's something that we as humans invented. Think about your day for a second. Maybe an alarm wakes you up in the morning, and you probably knew exactly when you needed to leave the house. Maybe you had lunch around noon or a meeting at 2 o'clock and then dinner at 6. Your entire day is stitched together by numbers that feel so normal that they're practically invisible. But what if you'd been born 2,000 years ago? Would you wake up at 6:30? Would work start at 8? Would noon even happen at the same time every day? The answer kind of surprised me because for most of human history there wasn't one official time. In fact, the town next to yours might have been using a completely different time altogether. Not because anybody had a broken clock, because that's just how the world worked. Once I realized that, I had another question. How did billions of people living in different countries and speaking different languages, like oceans apart from each other, end up agreeing on what time it is? To answer that, we have to go back way before clocks, before calendars, back to essentially the first people who looked up at the sky and realized it wasn't trying to show off, it was trying to tell them something. Uh problem solved, right? Except that wasn't the beginning at all. Because before anybody could build a clock, they first had to realize there was something worth measuring in the first place. Think about what life would look like a thousand years ago. You don't have a phone, you don't have a watch, there's no church bells going off at certain times in the day, there's no school bells telling you class had started, no digital clock glowing on the microwave, just the sky. The sun comes up, you wake up, the sun goes down, you go to sleep. Honestly, that works pretty well until it doesn't. Because after a while, people weren't just trying to make it through another day. They were trying to survive another year. So

Farming, Seasons, And Sky Patterns

SPEAKER_00 7:11

imagine you're a farmer. You don't care if it's 817 in the morning. That number doesn't mean anything to you. What you care about is when do I put these seeds in the ground? You plant too early, the frost kills everything. You plant too late, the crops don't have enough time to grow. That's not an inconvenience, that's the difference between feeding your family and going hungry. So people started paying attention, not to clocks, to patterns. The sun always rose over there, except it didn't stay there. Little by little, it drifted across the horizon throughout the year. The moon would change shape, the shadows would stretch and shrink, certain stars would disappear and then come back again. At first, they were just noticing things, and then they started to realize they're recognizing patterns. Eventually, those patterns could predict the future. And I love that because the very first timekeepers weren't trying to be on time, they were trying to stay alive. One of my favorite examples comes from ancient Egypt. Every year, the Nile River would flood. If the flood came, crops would grow, and if it didn't, life got a whole lot harder. So Egyptian astronomers spent generations watching the night sky. Like, think about that. For your great-grandparents, your grandparents, your mom, your dad, you all of you guys would watch the night sky, and then eventually they noticed that one star would get their attention. Like one star would kind of pop in. It was they called it Sirius. It's still known as Sirius. Every year, and not Sirius Black, like in the constellation. Every year, after disappearing for weeks, Sirius would just reappear just before sunrise. Not very long after, the Nile River would flood. So can you imagine being the first person to notice that? And then imagine your children noticing it too. And then their children, not because somebody wrote it in a textbook or they it was written in hieroglyphics, because families kept watching the sky year after year for centuries. That's how knowledge grows. It's not through one brilliant discovery, it's ordinary people just keep paying attention long enough to notice something extraordinary. And then I stumbled onto something that it kind of threw me off a little bit. Hundreds

Babylon And The Power Of 60

SPEAKER_00 9:34

of miles away in ancient Babylon, people were solving a totally different problem. How do you divide the sky into useful pieces? The Babylonians loved the number 60. And honestly, once you see why, it kind of makes a lot of sense. 60 is incredibly easy to divide. You can divide by two, three, four, five, six, ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty. It works beautifully. Thousands of years later, you're still living with that decision. Every time you glance at your watch, every 60-minute hour, every 60-second minute. I mean, look, think about it. That you we're still using that. They use 60, and that's where it came from, the Babylonians. That kind of blew my mind a little bit. I've always assumed that somebody just invented the hour the way like somebody invented the light bulb, and that's another story. Instead, it feels more like a relay race. Like the Egyptians did one thing and then they handed off the idea to the Babylonians. They added another piece, and then somebody else improved it, and then someone else. Along the way, kind of like we talked about in the photography episode, somebody took an idea, the next person changed it, tweaked it, and perfected it. Nobody knew they were building the system we would use a thousand years later. They were just solving the problem that was sitting right in front of them. And eventually, looking at the sky wasn't enough anymore because people wanted to know the time when the clouds were covering the sun, or at night, or inside buildings. They didn't want to look up at all. That's when the story takes another turn. Because now, I mean, humanity had figured out how to bring time down from the sky and into our hands. So

Water Clocks To Pendulum Precision

SPEAKER_00 11:33

by now, people had figured out something pretty incredible. Like the sky wasn't random, and if you're patient enough, it tells the same story over and over and over again. The sun, the moon, the stars, they all move in patterns. And once you understand those patterns, you can start predicting what comes next, which is a huge advantage, but it also created a problem because the sky isn't always available. What if it's cloudy? Or what if you're inside? Or what if it's the middle of the night? You can't exactly say, hang on, everybody, let me wait for the sun to come back. So the question changed. Instead of watching time, could we build something that behaved like it? The question sent people in a lot of different directions because I mean one of the earliest ideas was beautifully simple. Water. Imagine a stone bowl with a tiny hole in the bottom. As the water slowly drips out, the level drops at a steady pace. If you know how long it takes to empty, then you've got a way to measure time. It's not perfect. It's not surprisingly useful. And that kind of it threw me off a little bit because when I think of a clock, I picture gears and hands, and you know, some of the earliest clocks didn't have either one. They just leaked. Of course, you know, water has its own personality. Temperature changes how it flows, the shape of the container matters, even the amount of water makes a difference. So good enough wasn't always good enough. People kept experimenting. Eventually they discovered something else that keeps an incredibly steady rhythm: a swinging pendulum. If you've ever watched a playground swing, you've seen it. Back and forth and back and forth. As long as nothing interferes with it, that motion is remarkably consistent. In the 1600s, a Dutch scientist named Christiaan Huygens? We're gonna go with Huygens. Because I've tried to pronounce that several different ways and I just can't figure it out. I've even looked it up. He transformed that simple observation into the first successful pendulum clock. So suddenly clocks became dramatically more accurate than anything people had ever known to this point. And something interesting happened. Once people experienced accurate time, they started expecting it. A clock that lost a few minutes wasn't just annoying anymore, it was wrong. So then I realized something else. Up until now, every clock in the story stayed put. They sat in the church towers, uh, city squares, homes, workshops. If you wanted to know the time, you usually had to go to the clock. Eventually, people asked a different question. So,

Portable Watches And Longitude At Sea

SPEAKER_00 14:14

what if the clock came with you? Around the early 1500s, the craftsmen in Europe began building the first spring-powered portable watch. One of the names most often connected to that breakthrough is Peter Heinlein, a locksmith. He's from Nuremberg. Although historians still debate exactly how much credit belongs to him, these weren't wrist watches, they were pocket watches. And I mean, honestly, they weren't very accurate. Some of them gained time and some of them lost time. And most of them needed constant adjustment. But none of that really mattered because for the first time in history, time could travel, and you didn't have to walk to the town clock anymore to know what time it was. You could carry time in your pocket. I loved that, because I mean humanity had spent thousands of years bringing them closer to time itself. Like first we watched the sky, then we built clocks, and now we carried them with us. But there was one place portable clocks still kind of struggled, because they relied on very steady stepping and walking. When you put a clock in the ocean, imagine you're the captain of a ship crossing the Atlantic, and you know roughly how far north or south you are by looking at the stars. But east and west, that's another story, because and getting it wrong could be catastrophic. Like ships would run aground, cargo would vanish, entire crews disappeared. It's not because they couldn't sail, I mean, they were remarkable remarkably good at sailing back then. Because they they didn't know exactly where they were. And this is the amazing part. Longitude wasn't really a navigation problem, it was a time problem. The Earth rotates 360 degrees every 24 hours. That means it turns about 15 degrees every hour. So if you know the exact time where you are, and the exact time back at your home port, the difference tells you how far around the world you've traveled. So in theory, it's simple. It's almost impossible in practice, because now your clock has to survive months at sea, like salty air, humidity, heat, cold, storms. Uh it's a deck that uh it's constantly moving. Pendulum clocks were hopeless on a rolling ship. So an English carpenter named John Harrison decided to solve the problem. He wasn't a famous scientist, he didn't really go to college, he didn't train into university, he was just obsessed with building a clock that refused to drift. After decades of designing and rebuilding and improving his invention, Harrison created a marine chronometer. It was accurate enough to transform navigation forever. It didn't just tell sailors the time, it helped them find their place on the planet. And that might be my favorite realization from this entire chapter is every major breakthrough in timekeeping wasn't really about telling time. It was about solving the problem that they were facing. Farmers needed to know when to plant. Cities, they wanted reliable clocks to actually operate correctly. Travelers, they wanted portable time, sailors wanted to know where they were. Each new invention answered a question the previous one couldn't. By the late 1800s, watches were becoming more reliable, more affordable, and more common. At first, most people carried them in a pocket, like it was pocket watches everywhere. So you could imagine how that went over. During the First World War, though, soldiers discovered that reaching into a pocket in the middle of combat wasn't exactly the most convenient thing. A watch strapped to your wrist was faster and easier and always within sight. So after the war, men kept wearing them. And before long, millions of people were carrying time with them every single day. But we

Railroads Force Standard Time Zones

SPEAKER_00 18:36

still had another problem. Your watch and my watch and the clock in the next town might not all agree. As long as people mostly stayed close to home, that wasn't a big deal. And then intro trains. And suddenly being five minutes off could change everything. You know what surprised me most about this whole story? For most of human history, there wasn't one correct time. Really, if you lived in one town and I lived 20 miles away, noon for you might not be exactly noon for me. So it's not really that it wasn't a mistake. That's just how time worked. Noon wasn't something everybody agreed on. It was simply the moment the sun reached its highest point in your sky. That was your noon. And honestly, that worked just fine if you spent most of your life close to home. Why would it matter if another town's clock was just a few minutes different? Because it really didn't. For thousands of years, nobody cared. Then we invented something that moved a little bit faster than people ever had before. The railroad. At first I didn't see why trains would matter so much, but then I pictured it. You buy a ticket, the timetable says your train leaves at noon. So sounds simple enough, right? Except whose noon? The station where you're standing or the station where the train started? Those those could be different. In fact, they often were. The deeper I looked, the stranger it got. Some trains actually kept multiple clocks on the wall. One would show local time and another showed railroad time. Imagine trying to catch a train while the building itself couldn't even agree what time it was. And unlike showing up late for dinner, getting this wrong could kill people. Many railroads operated on one single track. Two trains traveling toward each other had to know exactly when the other one would arrive. A misunderstanding of just a few minutes wasn't really an inconvenience, it was the difference between a routine trip and a head-on collision. So the railroad companies decided something had to change. And on November 18, 1883, they did something that is insane. They changed time. People later called it the day of two noons. Railroad companies across the United States and Canada divided the continent into standard time zones. Station clocks were reset and timetables were completely rewritten. Pocket watches were also adjusted, but for a little while, many cities experienced two noons on the same day. One by the old local time, and then another one by the new railroad time. But here's the part that I wasn't really expecting. The government didn't force this to happen. The railroads did. People accepted it because life immediately became easier. Like it's as soon as they swapped these clocks over, life got easier. Trains were running a lot more safely. Businesses could coordinate across cities. Telegraph operators finally knew everybody. They knew what they were talking about at the same moment. Little by little, town by town, watch by watch, standard time stopped. Feeling new, and it just kind of became time. So once I realized, once I realized that I couldn't stop thinking about one thing, almost every invention in this story solved a problem that the people before it couldn't have imagined. So

Atomic Clocks, GPS, And Modern Life

SPEAKER_00 22:16

farmers wanted to know when to plant. Sailors wanted to know where they were. Railroads needed everyone to agree on the same minute. And we kept pushing for more. Pendulum clocks eventually gave way to quartz clocks. Quartz clocks became ridiculously accurate. And then came atomic clocks. Which atomic clocks are pretty precise. Like they're so precise that some would take billions of years to drift by like one second plus or minus. And that's almost impossible to wrap your head around because here's what's funny. You probably interacted with one today without realizing it. When your phone tells you where you are, like when GPS gives you directions or when the computers talk to each other across the internet, that's that's an atomic clock. They all depend on incredibly precise time. So you think about how far we've come from there. The story began with people standing in fields watching shadows move across the ground. And now it's helping your phone figure out which side of the street you're standing on. I love that because nobody sat down thousands of years ago and said, you know, let's invent GPS. Every invention just solved the next problem. And somehow all of those little solutions added up to the world we live in today. But spending every day by the clock has changed more than our technology, it's changed us. And that might be the most interesting rabbit hole of all. Seriously, I glance at the time now, and instead of seeing numbers, I'm seeing thousands of years of people trying to solve one problem after another. And then I started noticing something else. The clock isn't just hanging on the wall anymore, it's quietly running every single part of my day. Maybe yours too. Like your alarm goes off, you got coffee before work, lunch around noon, doctor's appointment at two, a kid's baseball game starting at six, you know, you tell a friend, hey, you want to meet around seven. None of that really happened by accident. It's millions of people making tiny agreements with each other every single day. And somehow it all works. Because I didn't ever, I don't think I'd ever stop to appreciate just how much of modern life depends on everybody agreeing what time it is. Take your medicine. If the doctor tells you to take a prescription every eight hours, like those hours kind of matter. Or aviation. Like everyday airplanes cross the same skies without running into each other. Not because the pilots are guessing, because everybody's involved. They're working from the same clock. Hospital records, they record exactly when symptoms began, when they ended. Weather stations compare storms across entire continents. Scientists on opposite sides of the world can run experiments at the same time. And none of that works if every town decides noon happens whenever they it feels right. So then I found something that was just ridiculous. Your phone doesn't just use satellites to figure out where you are, it uses time. Like we talked about, GPS satellites are constantly sending signals towards Earth. And your phone measures how long those signals take to arrive. So we're talking about differences measured in billionths of a second. Tiny, like unimaginably tiny. But those tiny differences are enough for your phone to calculate where you're standing. So the next time your GPS tells you to turn left, remember, you're really being guided by some of the most accurate clocks humanity's ever seen. And I had no idea. I mean, of course, there's another side to all this. Once clocks become incredibly accurate, we start organizing our lives around them: school bells, factories, offices, trains. So for forever, people mostly follow daylight and seasons, and now we follow schedules. It's not necessarily good or bad, I guess. It's just different. Accurate time gave us, say, for travel, modern medicine, global communication, the internet, GPS, things our ancestors couldn't even dream about. It also changed how we think about our days. Like sometimes we don't ask, is the work finished? We ask, what time is it? Like if you've ever sat and stared at the clock at 4:59 and you get off at 5, that's that's it. I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer there. Usually history is not that simple. Uh, but after following the rabbit hole all the way from ancient Egypt to the phone in my hand, one thing kept kind of sticking with me. The clocks changed and the calendars changed, technology got a little bit better. But the reason people cared about time never really did. So a farmer wanted to know when to plant, and you know, sailors wanted to know where he was at. I don't know if I'm gonna be late for dinner or you know, different lives, different centuries, different tools. Same question. What comes next? As fascinating as this story has been, there were still a few things I stumbled across that were just a little too weird to leave out. So one country actually skipped days on the calendar, another seriously tried to reinvent time itself with a 10-hour day. And I really wish I was making that up, but I'm not. So before we climb out of this rabbit hole, I've got a few more stories that you may want to hear. Let's get into that's wild.

The Weird Side Of Timekeeping

SPEAKER_00 28:00

Okay. So before we go any further, I need to show you some of the stranger things I found while I was researching this episode. Because once we started measuring time, we apparently just started doing some deeply confusing things with it. And the first one sounds completely made up. So February 30th was a real date. There has actually been a February 30th, not in like a badly printed calendar, just a real one. It happened in Sweden in 1712. And here's what went wrong. Sweden had decided to switch from the old Julian calendar to the new Gregorian calendar. But instead of just skipping a block of days like the other countries did, Swedish officials came up with a slower plan. They would gradually remove leap days over several decades. Which sounds reasonable-ish until you remember that a calendar only works when everybody follows the same plan. And they didn't. So a leap day that was supposed to be skipped in 1704 was still observed. And then they made the same mistake again in 1708. At that point, Sweden wasn't properly following the Julian calendar or the Gregorian calendar. It was using its own accidental made-up calendar that nobody else on Earth even knew about. And that's not ideal when you're trying to agree on what day it is with everybody else. So King Charles finally decided to abandon the whole experiment and return Sweden back to the Julian calendar. And to do that, Sweden added an extra leap day in 1712. And then February 29th was followed by February 30th. Just once, and then it disappeared forever. Somewhere in Sweden, people were actually born on a date that no longer even exists. So try explaining that at the DMV. France tried to give us a 10-hour day. There, well, listen. Then there was the French Revolution. So the revolutions, the revolutionaries weren't satisfied with changing the government. They wanted to rebuild literally everything, like weights, measurements, the calendar, even time. So in 1793, France officially introduced decimal time. So instead of 24 hours, the day would have 10. Each hour would contain 100 minutes, and each minute would contain 100 seconds. Which means a revolution, like a revolutionary French second, was not the same length as one of our seconds. Clocks were built with 10 numbers on their faces. And you can still find some of these if you look, you've got to look deep in the internet, but you still be able to find some of them, and they're really expensive. Some of those even display both systems at once. Presumably, I guess, so their owners, so their owners could be confused in two completely different ways. And they didn't stop with the clock. Like months were divided into three 10-day weeks. Like the familiar Sunday disappeared from the official calendar. Instead, workers received one rest day at the end of every 10-day period. So as you can imagine, that part wasn't especially popular. Decimal time made perfect mathematical sense. Like everything was divided into tens. But people don't live inside a math problem. They already knew what noon felt like. They already knew the rhythm of a seven-day week. They all the clocks they owned were already built for 24-hour days. And nobody wanted to perform arithmetic just to figure out whether lunch was late or not. So decimal time kind of quietly faded away, and they they just kind of forgot about it. They pretended it never happened. And honestly, we were one historical decision away from saying things like, I'll meet you at 4.7 tomorrow. So one of the first American alarm clocks had one setting. So the next story made me laugh because it feels like the least considered invention imaginable. In 1787, a clockmaker in Concord, New Hampshire named Levi Hutchins built an alarm clock. But there was there was a catch. You were not allowed to choose when it went off. So Hutchins designed it to ring at exactly four o'clock every morning. And that was the time he wanted to wake up. So apparently that was the time the clock believed everyone should wake up. There was no button or dial or weekend setting, like no bird songs or anything like that. It was at 4 o'clock in the morning, every single morning, forever. He never patented it or patented, he never patented it or tried to manufacture it widely, which may have saved him from becoming the most hated man in New England. And somehow, alarm clocks became even more irritating from there. In 1956, General Electric, like GE, introduced an alarm clock with a snooze function. The snooze lasted nine minutes. Not ten, nine. I'm not sure where the nine came from. And there are all kinds of stories claiming nine minutes was chosen because sleep scientists discovered it was the perfect amount of rest. That's a myth. The real reason appears to be a lot more simple. The mechanical gearing inside the clock made a nine-minute interval easier to produce. Ten minutes was just that much harder. So millions of people have spent decades receiving nine additional minutes of sleep because 10 was just too inconvenient. And that's, I mean, it kind of feels appropriate. Clocks could have turned the other way, but you know. And then here's like here's one I never questioned. Why do clocks, why do the hands turn clockwise? It feels natural, doesn't it? Of course, they move that way. That's just how it happens. Except there except there's nothing in nature that says they have to. The direction probably came from sundials made in the northern hemisphere. As the sun moved across the sky, the shadow on many horizontal sundials moved in the direction that we would now call clockwise. And when European clockmakers began building mechanical clock faces, they copied the direction because that's what they were used to. Like, had the very the very first tradition of clockmaking, if it if it would have developed around sundials in the southern hemisphere, then our clocks might have turned the opposite direction. And then that would have felt completely normal to us. Like we might describe something turning as clockwise left, which is just it's confusing to even think about it. So, which means the direction every clock in your house moves may be the historical result of just where clockmakers lived. Like Big Ben. So, okay, so we're gonna drift off on Big Ben for a second. Big Ben isn't the actual clock tower. Like, while we're correcting things, Big Ben is not actually the name of the clock in London, the clock tower. It's not even the official name of the clock. Big Ben is the name of the largest bell inside the tower. So the tower itself is called Elizabeth Tower. The great clock has its own mechanism and four huge faces, but the bell itself is Big Ben. So people have been using the name for the entire structure for as long as everyone understands that it's even been around. Still, if you've ever taken a picture in London and said, you know, that's Big Ben, you were technically pointing at the right thing, but you were pointing at the building that contains Big Ben. It's like seeing somebody's house and saying, Look, there's Steve. Like it he's in the house, but it's not him. And even the origin of the bell's nickname is kind of funky because one story says it honored Sir Benjamin Hall. He's like a big guy who supervised public works when the bell was installed. And then another links it to Benjamin Count, a famous heavyweight boxer. And then nobody knows for sure. It's never been verified that either one of those is correct. Some of the most recognizable clocks on earth, they're commonly called by the wrong name. So I mean, yeah. And if the origin of that wrong name itself is kind of lost, is either one true? That feels pretty human to me. I mean, I guess we just make it up and then we go with it. So the farmers didn't invent daylight savings time. And I mean, I get that. I could I could go with that because whenever I read that, I was kind of like, huh? We're gonna clear something up. Daylight savings time was not really created for farmers. And you've you might have heard that it was. I'd heard it once or twice. The story usually goes that farmers needed more daylight to work in the fields, but they already had a remarkably dependable way to know when daylight was available, anyways. They looked outside. So moving the hands of a clock doesn't give a farmer more sunlight, it just changes what number we call it. So, in fact, many farmers strongly opposed daylight savings time. Cows don't rate like reset themselves because somebody changed the clock. Markets and trains and all that stuff, they still operated by clock time, so the change could make a farmer's morning a little bit more difficult, not easier. Modern daylight savings time became pretty connected to efforts to conserve fuel and just make better use of the evening light, especially during the wartime. Like one of the earliest proposals came from Benjamin Franklin in 1784, but he didn't really he didn't actually propose changing the clocks. He wrote like a satirical essay suggesting that Parisians could save they could save candles by waking up earlier. Among his deliberately ridiculous suggestions were taxing window shutters and firing cannons at sunrise to wake up everyone. So no, Benjamin Franklin did not invent daylight savings time, farmers didn't ask for it, and the cows, they were just kind of chilling. The deeper I went into the history of time, the more I noticed the same thing. Our clocks feel permanent, the calendar feels inevitable, 24 hours feel like the only possible way a day could work. But I mean, they experimented with it for centuries, and like inventors made weird-looking clocks and strange choices, and governments lost track of their own calendars. And somehow all those decisions just kind of made us where we are today. They made us all the way here. And so every time you hit snooze for five minutes, just kind of think about that. It'll be for nine minutes. I think it still goes that way today on the iPhone, too. You can choose your snooze time, but the default is still set to nine minutes. So you're living with a little piece of history you never really agreed to.

Final Thoughts And A Sleep Tease

SPEAKER_00 40:04

So that's it for time. Now that rabbit hole was pretty fun, but the next one, I mean, it kind of led me from time to this one. One thing that was distracting me while I was just going over the time episode in general is when I read about clocks or calendars or time zones, I was running into another subject, which was sleep. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I mean, we spent thousands of years figuring out how to measure time, and then we built clocks that were so accurate they barely lose a second over a billion years, and then we carry them in our pockets and we wear them on our wrists. Some of us even get annoyed when we're 30 seconds late, and then every night we willingly disappear for eight hours. It's almost like we spend our entire day trying to control time only to let ourselves go over to it at night and just kind of see what happens. And that made me wonder, why do we have to sleep in the first place? Like, what is our brain actually doing while we're asleep? Why can't we just decide we're done sleeping forever? Scientists have been studying these questions forever, and believe it or not, there are still parts of the answer we don't fully understand. I was expecting to find the rabbit hole while researching clocks. Like I was figured I'd end up somewhere else, but that one kind of just stuck out. So now I can't stop thinking about it. So next time we're gonna put the clocks away and we're gonna jump down the rabbit hole of sleep. And we're gonna see what happens. See you there.