Ep.6 Chasing the Sun: How Humanity Learned to Tell Time

Don’t be alarmed at the beginning! It was quite the exercise to get this episode up arm running, and there is no better example than starting the recording and introducing my own podcast incorrectly! I do these in one take, and you get what you get and it was too funny not to leave it in. Enjoy! On to the important stuff!In this Episode:Ever wonder why there are 60 minutes in an hour? Or why we torture ourselves twice a year by changing our clocks? From ancient Sumerian mathematicians to ships lost at sea, this is the wild history of how humans learned to capture time itself.Journey back 5,000 years to the shadows of Egyptian sundials, discover how the Babylonians gave us our 60-minute hour, and find out why John Harrison’s clock literally saved thousands of lives on the open ocean. We’ll explore the chaos of the pre-time zone world (imagine publishing train schedules when every town has a different time!), uncover what really happened at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington D.C., and settle once and for all whether Benjamin Franklin actually invented Daylight Saving Time (spoiler: he didn’t).Plus: why farmers actually hate DST, the surprising story of the Sunshine Protection Act that passed the Senate but never became law, and how we went from “sometime around midday” to atomic clocks that lose less than a second every 300 million years.In This Episode: • Ancient sundials and the invention of the “hour” • Why the Sumerians chose base-60 (and why you still use it every day) • The longitude problem and Harrison’s legendary marine chronometer • How railroads forced us to create time zones • The 1884 conference that divided the world into 24 slices • Benjamin Franklin’s satirical essay that everyone misunderstood • The bizarre history of Daylight Saving Time and why it won’t diePerfect for history buffs, science nerds, and anyone who’s ever been late because they forgot to spring forward.