Matters of Time

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I'm Roman Mars. For the most part, we take time for granted. Maybe we don't have enough of it, but at least we know how it works. Most of the time, a lot of what we think about time and how we keep track of it is relatively recent.

And some aspects that we take for granted aren't actually all that universal. And today we're going to be talking to a few of my 99.ca colleagues for a set of mini stories about our evolving relationship with time. And to get us started, it's cold-stead, co-author of the 99% Invisible City. And in our book, we wrote about the standardization of time that came with the rise of railroads.

Right. And before standard times, rail companies had to juggle all of these city-specific time zones. But there's one really neat artifact, in particular, from that period, which really brings the point home. So here's this old ornate clock that hangs on the facade of the Bristol Corn Exchange building in England.

So this is a lovely clock with red letters and red hands, except for there seems to be kind of what looks like a long black, almost like a second hand, potentially, but I can't quite make sense of what it's for. Yeah, yeah. One could definitely think that's the second hand, but it's actually a second minute hand. So there are two different minute hands, and they're set about 10 minutes apart from each other.

And they're painted those different colors so that people on the streets below can tell them apart. So does this second minute hand also have to do with trains? Absolutely. So they have this one hand that's for Bristol.

And then when train travel started becoming more commonplace, they added a second minute hand to show London time. And that's the one that's colored black. Got it. So one hand is for locals.

They're still on the local time. The other is for people traveling in and out of the city. And presumably that the local time is based on high noon when the sun is highest in the sky. That's what we talk about in the book.

How did they get this London time that's shown here in this picture about 10 minutes off? Right. So that's the crazy part. Apparently, they actually sent people out from London on trains with these precisely tuned watches.

And so that way they could keep clocks like this one up to date on London time. So the railroad used the train network to keep track of time. Yeah, it's sort of this weird meta phenomenon. And so you have these dedicated timekeepers who would arrive in a given town and then they'd hop off the train and they'd go show their watch to the station master because the local railroad operators needed to know their size time in London.

And then those same watch wearing travelers would hop onto another train to a different city and so on and so forth. And they'd go about basically updating clocks all across the country one station at a time. That is wild. Imagine all the people riding around just two set blocks.

It was like everyone's like a cog in their own clock. Yeah, it's great. It's just parts of a machine. It's hilarious.

Yeah, I love it. I love it so much. And it's so hard for us today to wrap our minds around the way it was. But really, up until that point, local time was just the time.

And so that's just how people went about their days. And a lot of folks were pretty reluctant to get on board with these new fangled ideas like Standard Time. So really, this like 300 o'clock is a relic of that brief moment in time between the old and new. And there was an acceptance that Standard Time was kind of required in some ways, but local time was still preferred.

And you were just like in this weird interregnum where both of those things were equally dominant. Yeah, that's exactly it. And what's talking about this transition is that railroads really effectively collapsed both space and time. And what do I mean about it?

Well, they made longer journeys go faster, right? But they also compressed the world into these fewer number of time zones. So that suddenly you don't have hundreds of time zones for every city. You just have two dozen spanning the globe.

And meanwhile, local time was this really big headache and increasingly a safety hazard for railway operators. Because if they got it wrong, even by a few minutes, trains could literally crash into each other. And of course, eventually there were global agreements around time and things became standardized. But I'm really fond of these quirky exceptions and these little remnants of that interstitial period like this clock in Bristol.

So what follows is a bunch of stories about the struggle of us all being on the same time together. Who gets left behind? What individuality gets squashed when everyone tries to sync up and all be at the same place at the same time? So for our next time story, we're going to be talking to 99PI producer, Joe Rosenberg, K.

Joe. Hey, everyone. So what do you have for us? So for this story, we're basically going to start where Kurt left us off.

This kind of moment of transition when it comes to timekeeping and Britain. Yeah, like the rise of the regimented one day in time. Yeah, exactly. And everyone running around with watches being like, this is the time.

This is it. I know the time you don't get with the program. This is the time. Exactly.

Because it turns out that there's this one very specific profession from around that period, the middle of the 19th century. That's a variation on that phenomenon. And out of all of the whimsical, quirky jobs that have ever existed in human history, it's now my favorite. Okay.

What is it? Well, I want you to imagine that you were a factory worker and say like Manchester in the 1860s. And maybe you've moved to city from countryside where you were used to just getting up with the sun. You worked when it was light.

You didn't when it was dark. It's pretty simple. But now you have to get up before it's even light because your ship at the local cotton mill starts at like 2 AM sharp. Hmm.

Yeah. So the question is, how do you do this? How do you wake up? I'm assuming there's no alarm clocks at this point.

There's probably not even widespread watches for this class of people necessarily. Yeah, no alarm clocks and the watches will get to those things. Yeah, they're not cheap or widespread at the very least. So instead, the solution is that you would rely on a kind of human alarm clock by hiring a knock her upper.

And knock her upper. It sounds faintly rude. It has an out of context. But it wasn't.

It was a proper job to knock her upper. So this is Ruth Goodman. She is a UK story and TV presenter and the author of the books, How to Be a Victorian and the Domestic Revolution. Her specialty is everyday life in historical periods.

And she says a knock her upper was someone with a good watch, meaning back then an after watch, who would be paid a small fee by various individual residents of a working class area to wake each of them up at a particular time, depending on the way they would be. But naturally, you can't have somebody banging on the door at two o'clock in the morning saying, why do you wake you up enough to wake all the neighbors? And so the way the knock her upper would do it is they would go around with this really long fine cane and just reach up to the upper floors of buildings and lightly tap on their customers window panes until they woke up. I can see why this is your favorite drama history.

This is delightful. I love it. Yeah, I mean, it's like the Kenzian, but it's like nice. Exactly.

And so they would just slowly go around to one address at perhaps four or five AM, tap on the upper left window, then move on to the next house at four 10 AM, tap on the lower right window and just go down their list and always aiming, of course, to tap very gently, but not too gently. Some knock her upper swab line that you needed a particular, you know, bit of something on the end of the cake to get the right amount of noise that we wake people up in the room, but not wake people up next door. And that way, if they wanted to wake up cool, they'd also have to pay you. There's no point having one paying customer to street the whole street getting the benefit.

And so here, let me show you a photo of a knock her upper applying their trade. Oh, this is great. So this is long row of houses connected houses, row houses and a person on the street with a cane that looks like 15 feet long or something like that, like really something. Yeah, no, it's solid somewhere between 15 and 20 feet long.

It's giant. Can't just reach up to that second floor. And you can see he's just going down this kind of classic London row house tapping on each window. That's so great.

So I see what you need to use the cane for the second floor. What do they do for the first floor that's going to be like the middle of the street trying to reach that thing. Yeah, so there was a few different knocking up methods. The cane was just one depending on where your customers were and where the land was.

So some people had like a mallet for ground floor doors. Others in like company towns might be hired by a mining company to very deliberately wake up everyone at the same time. And apparently those knock ruppers since the whole point was to be as loud as possible. Used like one of those wooden clackers that you would see at soccer matches.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I do actually. But most knock ruppers, like we said, found ways to be a little more precise. One very famous knock rupper.

She used a pea shooter and she had a little that hollow tube and she would blow dry peas window. Wow. What do we know who that person is? We actually do.

That apparently was Mary Ann Smith of East London. And there's also a really charming photo of her. Let me show you that one too. Oh my god.

This is so great. So she's just there with her pea shooter, her hands in her cardigan, which I'm assuming holds the pebbles or peas that she is shooting. Yeah, but she's like puffed out. Exactly.

Yeah. She's in mid-p-shoot. That's so good. Oh, it's so good.

Yeah. It's really fascinating the way official regiment of time is just kind of proliferating and it hasn't quite reached into the bedroom of the working class, but just as far as their window. Yeah. And in addition to it kind of spreading practically, it was also spreading culturally in the 19th century.

People were getting really into being very precise about what time it was. Ruth says it was just seen as the modern forward thinking thing to do. And she says one fun example in her own research where she could kind of see this plane out is actually the Jack the Rivercase. Going through all those police reports was extraordinary because there they are at the end of the 19th century saying at 916, and I'm thinking, 916, that's ridiculously accurate.

And then they're saying, 6 minutes later, this happened and 14 minutes later that, there is no way a watch from that era could possibly be giving you quite that accuracy. And the people who were making these statements weren't even carrying watches. So the report to Jack the River, they're just making it up. Yeah.

Like he just heard the church bells ring maybe a quarter of an hour ago and he's just like, winning it. But he doesn't choose a nice round number. He chooses a very precise number because it lends authority to his statement. So the idea that you could be that precise was culturally enticing, but not actually practically possible.

Yeah, if you want to give legitimacy to your testimony, make it really precise. It totally makes sense, but it's really funny. Yeah, it really is. And so of course in this kind of cultural environment where you would rather lie than be caught not knowing the exact time, pocket watches are like really covered items.

It was the must have bling, you know, techno bling, but they were pricey. So from about the 1860s, you start to see little businesses setting up with people who have got some sort of timepiece, getting time information to other people. And so this is when the knock-around business is really in its heyday where every urban working class neighborhood had its own knock-around. And that person would invest in a good, accurate timepiece, almost like someone invested in a taxi cabin, and then embarked on this career and hope to pay that timepiece off and eventually start turning the profit.

And was it considered a good career? I mean, I know that having a watch was a high status symbol, but like was being a knock-around-around high status symbol job? Like, could you make money at it? Well, I asked Ruth about that.

And she told me you might charge each client maybe like six pence per week, which of course meant nothing to me. Is that a lot, I guess? Or is that within, is that reasonable? I'm curious if that's like a...

I mean, yeah, it's a sort of reason. I mean, if you had 20 or 30 clients, then you could just about scrape some survival. So it is a profession of desperation. Done by people who are really poor, particularly older women seem to be in a lot of older female knock-arounders.

And so it turns out people like Mary Ann Smith of East London were not the exception. Ruth says that when we think of the Victorian period, we like to think of the women as being strictly in the home. But the truth is, is that in the lower classes, the number of women earning an income, doing heavy manual tasks, hauling bricks, breaking stones, shifting clay was huge. So many of these women would have been physical laborers in the younger years.

And now they reach the point where they simply can't do that. The body won't take you anymore. And this sort of knock-around-upper work is the sort of thing that somebody in that position would take. And in some ways, this put them in an even more vulnerable position, as you might imagine, walking the streets of London's roughest neighborhoods alone at night.

So it must have been quite a dangerous job, I would have thought, particularly for an older woman. But you'd have to be pretty tough. I mean, some of the pictures show, some of these people would take a dog with them, you know, personal security. And you can't say blame.

Yeah. Another interesting group of people who did knock-around up however, completely different. And that's the police constables. Yeah, exactly.

So apparently most police constables did not have a watch, like we mentioned before, at least an accurate watch. But those that did, if they had a good watch and a night shift, this was something they could do for a little extra cash. They could just move on. It's a knock-around-upper.

And incredibly, you also see this in the Rivercase. The very first victim, Mary Nichols, when the chat found her, he went to find a constable. He found a constable. And he told him he found this body.

And the constable was too busy knocking up. He carried on knocking up. He didn't come to see the body immediately. He made it to be a client.

Wait a minute. Time is the money. You got to get your knock-around-upper job. The body can wait.

Oh yeah, the body can totally wait. But I still like to believe that if only he had not been knocking up, we might know Jack the Rivercase. The tyranny of time has sort of kept us from knowing Jack the River. I mean, it's so interesting.

I mean, the way all these people in these situations are kind of just beholden, culturally and economically, to this new form of timekeeping, whether they had a way of measuring it or not. Yeah. And like I said earlier, mechanized time wasn't yet in most people's bedrooms. But somehow here it was reaching out and almost literally tapping on their windows because they had to inform to it.

Time was coming for them. Whether they liked it or not. Yeah. And of course, this technology eventually came for the knock-around-upper's too once we no longer had any use for them.

And I actually kind of owe the article from the Guardian from 1914 where they interviewed an unnamed knock-around-upper describing the decline of the trade. And he says, when they're knocking up, isn't what it was. At one time, I had 60 clients on my books. Now I've only 20.

And I've bought up the businesses of three others. I expect I should be the last of the knock-around-upper's. What can you do when alarm clocks allowed enough to summon a fire engine can be bought for half a crown? And I've been knocked up for 30 years and never broken a pain or wrapped on the wrong house except one.

And they let me get them up for a month before they told me. And he says that family never paid up. So not only was it hard to have got like harder as the years went on. And he was just so polite.

You know, like so polite until the very end. The whole process seemed incredibly polite with this kind of light tapping on windows. It's sort of sad to see it go by the way aside for blaring alarms in our rooms. Yeah, it almost makes me wish I could be opened up by a knock-around myself instead of my iPhone.

But incredibly, some people kind of got this wish because this guy was wrong about one thing he wasn't the last. There are reports that the very, very last of the knock-around-upper's in the town of Bolton in Northern England didn't retire until 1973. 1973 is not the year before I was born. You are a contemporary Roman of knock-around-upper's.

That's hilarious. Who is that last knock-around-upper? I have not been able to find that out. I don't know their gender or their clients or their method.

But I'm just really touched that this profession that started out as a kind of harbinger of the forces of change. Nevertheless, turned into a tradition and the process actually kind of became a time-keeping holdout. That is lovely. Well, thank you so much, Joe.

Thank you, Roman. Up next is producer of Evangelionlay. So ever since COVID started, 9-N-P-I went all remote and the staff has kind of scattered across North America. And so now we have staffers in four time zones, which can be kind of a pain in the ass.

But I guess the alternative would be worse. Like if we were one time zone, but actually 3,000 miles away. Yes, exactly. And that's a story that I have for you right now.

It's a story about one time zone, a place with only one time zone. And how it's become intertwined with power and politics and freedom. Wow. Okay.

Well, this is dramatic. Let's hear it. Yeah, like I mentioned, very wide countries like the US or Canada or Russia. We have these multiple time zones to break up the day because otherwise the amount of daylight in a day would be unevenly distributed depending on how far east or how far west you are.

But there is a country with a very wide landmass that only uses one official time zone across the entire territory. And that's China. One time zone across the entire country. Yeah.

And according to the Guinness Book of World Records, it's actually the largest country in the world with only one time zone. I mean, it's one of the largest countries in the world in general. So like... But how wide is China?

Like what are we working with here? It's roughly as wide as the United States or Canada. And as astronomers in China have pointed out many times, it really bile writes ought to have five time zones with generally go every 15 degrees. So this is Gardener Bovingdon.

He's an associate professor in the Departments of Central Eurasian Studies and International Studies at Indiana University. Wow. Gardener Bovingdon? Next time I check into a hotel under a pseudonym, I'm going in as Gardener Bovingdon.

That is such a good name. That's exactly what I said. Has anybody ever told you that you have like the perfect name for a podcast? It has been mentioned before.

So awesome. So if Gardener is saying that China should actually encompass five different time zones, why does it operate with only one? And has it always been like this? No, it hasn't.

And actually, timekeeping across country was sort of all over the place until the end of World War II. And for a brief period of time, they actually did observe five time zones across the country. But that was all thrown out in 1949 after the establishment of the People's Republic of China. So the Communist Party had just won this long civil war.

And leadership thought that having won national time on every clock across China was this very literal way to unite a fractured country. A state has many challenges in trying to touch people in all the parts of the country, what we call the reach of the state. This was a quick, very efficient way to do it to say there's one time and it's the time we're using for the entire country. And that time is called Beijing time.

Which means that when it's 9am in Beijing, it's 9am 2,700 miles away in Kachar. Yes, one thing I'm struck by is that if you look at a map, Beijing, the nation's capital where the national time is based, it's like all the way up in the northeastern part of China. And so that leaves everyone to the west, like really, if it was centered, at least you would have something to work with. But it's really in one extreme location.

So how does people in the far west deal with a clock that doesn't match their solar day, like really at all? So Gardener is actually a scholar of Xinjiang, which is an autonomous territory in the northwest of China. It's really far west and it's home to about 12 million readers who are an ethnic minority native to Xinjiang. They speak weir and are Muslim and they're very different culturally from the Han majority, which make up about 92% of the country.

And for decades, the Chinese government has worried about separatism in the region and it's led to pretty severe state-sponsored suppression of weir life and to an ongoing genocide. I'll get more into this later. Okay, I'll put a bit of that. But I wanted to kind of rewind back to the 1990s when Gardener first began traveling to Xinjiang.

My first trip to Xinjiang was in 1994. He was doing field research in the region and he realized that there were actually two separate time zones that existed in Xinjiang. There was Beijing time, which was the official national time, and this was used by the Han Chinese in the area. But then there was this totally different time that was used by the weirder population called Xinjiang time or local time.

It was only when I started to understand weirder that I heard people using this expression for Xinjiang time in weirder. And then I started thinking, wait a minute, why are they saying that? Then I started noticing that the time that they used the numbers they used for time were two hours off that of Beijing time. So Beijing time was and still is the official time zone in Xinjiang.

So things like train stations and government offices, they all run on Beijing squad. And if you were to ask a Han person what time it was, they would tell you in Beijing time. But Gardener noticed that if a weirder person were asked what time it was, they would most likely respond with the quote, global time, which was two hours behind Beijing. And this was because it more closely followed the solar pattern of Xinjiang.

Wow, that's complicated, at least from what garden rooms are back in the 90s. How did that work in everyday life? Yeah, so take for example what we call noon. So like basically when the sun is at its highest point in the day.

If you were to ask someone who was weak or what time it was, they might say it was 12pm. But if you were to ask someone who was Han, they would probably tell you it was actually 2pm. So for Han Chinese people in Xinjiang, life has just lived two hours earlier than local time. Are they waking up and going to work in the dark and just dealing with the inconvenience, you know, just to keep in step with Beijing?

So to work Beijing hours? I wondered that too, but no. Since I started out by suggesting Beijing wanted to extend its authority over the whole country and show that it was doing so, it might make sense for people to get up, right? To be ready at their work unit at 8 or 9, Beijing time, and so on.

And that might have been so at one time, but my impression was in the 1990s and 2000s that that wasn't so, that even Han saw used Beijing time shifted two hours. Now, I was curious about this and I asked some people. So the convenience of one time zone is kind of defied by the fact that if a Beijing official calls at 9 o'clock in the morning Beijing time, the person in the working unit in Urumqi is not going to be in the office, right? Well, yeah, but that's understood.

So Han people actually lived by Xinjiang, so it's time, even though they use Beijing's clocks to communicate the time. Okay, so, you know, how much did these two time zones bump into each other because, I mean, it just sounds so confusing. Yeah, I mean, kind of. So if you're a foreigner and you're meeting up with a local, you should probably specify which time they're using.

I was reading this account from a Han Chinese person who happened to be friends with a lot of weavers, and he was annoyed because he would always show up like two hours early for the first time. But Garner said that in most cases it wasn't all that confusing because we basically knew which clock to refer to by the language that they were speaking or who they were speaking to. Like if they were talking to a Urumqi family member or friend, maybe they would say, hey, I'm leaving for a Urumqi man to a Han person. They automatically knew to say, hey, I'm leaving for a Urumqi man.

I mean, that sounds just like classic code switching, but that, you know, someone who was Urumqi would have to adjust their language depending on the culture of the person they were talking to. And they would know to do it and they would be the owners would be on them to do it. Yeah, exactly. I didn't actually know the word code switching in 1994.

Today, I think you're spot on. It's exactly right. So there are linguistic codes, right? When a bilingual Spanish English speaker speaks, she will use the Anglo version of names to convenience English speakers and switch to the Spanish version of names in order not to be mocked by fellow Spanish speakers.

And here we're talking about time codes, switching time codes. It is interesting to me that the time would they actually depended on the ethnicity of who you were asking. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and Gardner says that he thought that this was actually a political statement, you know, like, even in the 1990s for Uyghurs, open dissent could be interpreted as a threat of separatism, which could get you in a lot of trouble with the Chinese government.

But by choosing to set your watch to local time instead of Beijing time, it felt like this quiet and private form of protest or solidarity. People might not dare to be openly hostile, openly resistant, openly demonstrating so forth. And so instead, they'll find little ways, possibly hidden or half hidden to express their defiance and to show each other that they are defying the government. And so we could say that keeping one's daily schedule on Xinjiang time and when pressed calling it Xinjiang time and rejecting Beijing time are all modes of everyday resistance.

Hmm. That is so fascinating. And it's, you know, given the intensity of the news coming out of Xinjiang now, like, how safe is it to use Xinjiang time presently? Like, how secret and can you be?

Yeah. Yeah. So as you noticed, Gardner's observations of local time versus Beijing time mainly took place in the 1990s and early 2000s. Basically, Gardner is part of a group that calls themselves the Xinjiang 13, their group of scholars who have essentially been pretty much barred from entering China because of the scholarly work that they wrote about Xinjiang.

So he hasn't actually been able to return to China since 2005. So that's why most of this comes from like the early 90s or the mid 90s. But over the past few years, the human rights crisis has escalated severely. It's at the point where the US has determined that what's happening to the Uighurs in Xinjiang is genocide.

Mass and term and about two million members of the mostly Muslim ethnic minority group, the Uighurs, the psychological torture. US and other countries have labeled China's treatment of Uighurs as genocide. China may be expanding its so-called re-education camps. And among many other human rights violations, a large population of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities have been detained in what have officially been called vocational education training centers, but are effectively re-education camps.

I mean, clearly they're camps, which is a distinction between other schools or training centers or prisons as well in some ways. But it's very clear from people that have been in them that have worked in them that they are actually camps, that they're a prison space, a carceral space, really a medium security prison. So this is Darren Biler. He's an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University, and he studies how ethnic minorities in northwest China are surveilled and policed.

He's done a lot of field work in Xinjiang and was last there in 2018. And he says that, you know, because of the pervasiveness of surveillance technology paired with smartphone use, using local time could actually be potentially dangerous. I'm sure most people now have their phone set to Beijing time. And, you know, most people expect to have their phone checked to have it scanned, or in some cases they're forced to install nanny apps on their phone, which will upload the data that's being collected on their phone.

So most people are aware that everything on their phone is basically state property at this point. And it's not that it's necessarily against the law to use local time, but Darren says that a legal person could be putting themselves in a vulnerable position if they had their phone set to anything other than Beijing time. So in the government documents or in documents that are in circulation in the Chinese internet from Xinjiang, they talk really directly about this issue. They say that you should look really carefully at people that are using local time.

They don't say outright that it's illegal necessarily in most cases, but it is certainly something that they're looking at as a sign of suspicion. And there's a laundry list of things that can be interpreted as a quote, sign of separatism, like wearing a headscarf, having a beard, having WhatsApp installed on your phone, or simply speaking to someone who lives abroad. These are all things that have gone people in trouble with the government. And Darren even said that he noticed people having to self censor themselves in all these private ways, like having to change the way that they greet each other over the phone so that they drop Islamic identifiers.

So time is just one example of how these intimate parts of we are culture are being suppressed. It's a sign of them potentially being separatists, being more loyal to their own ethnicity, their own geographic location than the nation. And so there's definitely pressure on people to use Beijing time. I mean, when you think about the history of the implementation of one time zone, you see it sort of presaging all this other form of suppression that has these differences that are properly capable of existing inside of one country.

You know, like time zones can exist inside one country. And it's just kind of stunning that they once had five time zones and created one. And what that says about everything else. Yeah, and Garner Bovington from earlier in the piece said that, you know, even from the beginning, it was very clear who wasn't going to fit into a system built on Beijing time.

You design a system of timekeeping that's manifestly at odds with the local experience of the sun's transit through the sky. And so reminds people constantly, you are at the periphery. You're not in the center. Garner said something kind of interesting, which was like the reason why it's at the Beijing time is because this is a capital.

This is where the orders emanate. This is where you should be looking for leadership. But that really shows how little thought that they put into the people, you know, three thousand miles away in the West. Like how little consideration that it took to consider what their days might look like.

And how little consideration they had for the sun. Like it is telling to me that there's this denial of reality that goes along with this denial of human rights. It's not surprising to me that those two things go together. Yeah.

I got really intense there at the end. I thought we were just talking about time zones. Well, that was incredibly fascinating. Thank you so much.

Thank you. When we come back, Chris Barouba on the surprisingly controversial issue of springing forward and falling back after this. So I'm here with Chris Barouba and Chris, you want to talk about one of the great time-related debates? I do.

I want to talk to you today about daylight saving time. And so I always say daylight saving time. Is it not daylight saving time? Absolutely not.

That is not what I'm going to talk about. No, in all the legislation that has made DST daylight saving time happen, they drop the S. But that's not the controversy around it. There's other controversies related to daylight saving time.

It's something that people around the world kind of take for granted in large parts of North America and Europe and South America. And you know how daylight saving time works. It's in the summer, we spring forward one hour. So that's actually the daylight being saved is the extra daylight in the evening when the sun sets later.

And then around October, it falls back. So then you lose an hour and you have an earlier sunset. And it's something that I've been used to because I've had it my whole life. It's just a thing that happens twice a year.

But it's actually really controversial. And there are people who are trying to change the future of daylight saving time right now. And that's what I want to talk about. But before we get to that, Roman, do you know where daylight saving time comes from?

I was always told that it was because of farmers, that they needed more daylight to do farming. That is not at all the case. Much like daylight saving time, it is a myth that it's about farmers. And I know that because I called this guy.

This is Dr. David Prero. I'm the author of the book, C's the Daylight, the Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time. He actually is the world expert on the subject of DST.

I don't like to say that, but yes, some people have said that. When people find out that you're a daylight saving expert, do they get mad at you? Because I feel like it is a charged thing. People have strong opinions about it.

Well, what happens is when they listen out, the day they lose the hour of sleep, everybody gets mad at me. The day they sleep an extra hour, nobody comes and thanks me. So when I was talking to Dr. Prero, I brought up the farmer thing that everyone seems to think about daylight saving.

And what he told me is it's a total myth. Farmers, many people think they always say that was put into help with farmers and they see exact 100% opposite. They have to follow the sun, independent of what the clock says. So you might say so what?

Like they're just through it and everybody else. Change their clock. But the problem is that farmers have to interact with the rest of the world. They have to bring products to market.

So farmers have to get up with the sun and the businesses they're working with are using the clock. So it's inconvenient to when twice a year the clock-based businesses are shifting their time around. So the headline here is farmers are not responsible for daylight saving time. The credit slash blame belongs to a British house builder named William Willett.

And each morning he'd wake up at sunrise, go out for a horseback ride around his area. And while he was on one of these morning horseback rides he would realize that everybody else is asleep and they're not making good use of the beautiful spring and summer mornings. So he wrote this pamphlet called A Waste of Daylight. He wrote this pamphlet promoting the idea of pushing back the clocks one hour in the summer.

And it was really influential. And the British Parliament actually took up his idea. That's how influential his pamphlet became. Well, and did they approve it based off this pamphlet?

They did not. So some politicians argued this was a completely pointless thing. They were like, hey, if you want more daylight, why don't you just wake up earlier? Yeah, it seemed intuitive to them.

So they've rejected it. Willett was not the type to be dissuaded. So the next year he came back again with the same proposal and the same proposal the next year and the next year as it can't be being considered but rejected. And this became a perennial piece of legislation.

So actually like Winston Churchill became a champion of this. He was the headline speaker at a big rally for daylight saving, but it was rejected in 1911. It was rejected in 1912. It was rejected in 1913.

It was rejected in 1914. And then... In 1950, unfortunately, Willett passed away. Never to ever see his idea come to fruition.

If Willett had lived one more year, he would have seen his idea implemented because in 1916, World War I was in full swing. And across all of the countries fighting in the war, there was an energy crisis because a lot of coal miners had joined the military. So they wanted to save energy because there wasn't enough coal miners to actually provide the energy that they needed to run the country. Exactly.

And Germany, the first country to realize like, hey, one great way to save energy is to do this daylight saving thing. That Britain has been considering for all these years. So Germany brings it in and then immediately Britain becomes really jealous. Within a month after having rejected it for seven or eight years, within a month of the Germans putting it in the British.

And eventually the countries put it in on both sides of the war. And that's how we got daylight saving is because of World War I. That's amazing. And also keeping up with the Joneses doing World War I, which is an amazing part of that story.

Yeah, it might be more accurate to say we got it because of World War I and jealousy. Those are the causes of it. And actually, at first it was really complicated. It was a big problem because people kept breaking their clocks because the clocks were not built in a way that you could manually move the hour hams back and forth.

But fast forward 100 years. And throughout the last century, most of Europe adopted daylight saving time. It spreads to North America. Countries around the world have tried using it on and off.

And what we see now is about 70 countries worldwide have daylight saving time. And even though it's common, it's still pretty controversial. Like I grew up in Canada. I really like daylight saving time in the summer because you get that extra sunlight in the evening.

But I'll say during Canadian winters, when daylight saving time goes away and we go back to standard time, it can be brutal. Like there are parts of Canada where you can just get these really early sense sets. Well, that part of daylight saving is not that I have a problem with daylight saving in terms of like, I think it should be there all the time. I mean, I don't understand why it needs to fall back.

I think it's the thing. So my sense of the controversy is the period of time that is not daylight saving time, not the part that is. Does that make sense? Yeah, and you're not alone in that position at all because about 10 years ago, there was a political movement in the United Kingdom where this whole idea comes from to take daylight saving time and push it even further.

Oh, that's exciting. Well, there's a question. Could this weekend be the last time we put the clocks back, assuming you remember to, of course, well, there are grain calls this lunchtime for exactly that saying the current system is outdated. You go to work as dark, you come home as dark, hey, perhaps we should do with an extra hour light and get a lot more done when it's light, children can play out longer.

And it became this really popular campaign. It actually had a catchy name. The name of the campaign was lighter, later. Lighter, later.

Joining me now, I add lighter, lighter, lighter campaign. Lighter, lighter, lighter campaign. This is the first time you've ever seen. Yeah, memorable name really hard to say.

And actually, the lighter, later campaign wasn't just about moving the clocks up one hour in the winter. That campaign actually proposed that we double daylight saving time in the summer. You're going to have to explain what that means because I have a very tenuous grasp on daylight saving as it is. So it's complicated, but please bear with me.

So under lighter layer, you'd have an extra hour of daylight in the winter. Basically, you wouldn't do the fall back. Fall back. Okay.

Yeah. And then just for a treat, just for fun, let's actually give ourselves one other hour of daylight in the summer. So basically, the clocks will move forward one hour all year round. In the winter and great Britain, you'd be on summertime and in the summer, you'd be on something called double summertime.

Which is just everything. That's exactly right. And when this campaign was rolling out, they were listening all these benefits and like, just listen to the list of benefits of double daylight. It sounds really good.

It's claimed the overall health of the nation would improve as people could enjoy daylight for longer. Children, they benefit as many of them aren't allowed to leave their homes after dark. They'd be able to play outside for longer. It's estimated up to 100 road deaths could be prevented annually across Britain due to better visibility.

And around 450,000 tons of CO2 would be saved by people switching their lights on later. It's great for the environment. It's great for safety. It's great for health.

Like, what is not to love about this idea? I mean, it sounds fantastic. It does seem like as you begin to creep up even further, it'd be really dark in the morning, right? Oh, 100%.

But I mean, just think about all those benefits, right? The argument they always made was like, yes, obviously it would be darker in the morning than we're used to. But the benefits outweigh that one negative part of this. So in 2012, the UK Parliament actually decided to take up this idea.

And it felt like one of those few things that everybody could agree on. So environmentalists liked it, business leaders liked it. Also politically, labor politicians were in favor of it and so were the conservatives. Actually, it was a conservative MP in Rebecca Harris who proposed launching this pilot project for later.

She's the one who put forward the legislation. Wow. All political persuasions enjoyed the Sun. Yeah.

So Rebecca Harris puts it forward about 120 members of Parliament say they're going to support the bill, polls show it's really popular. It looks like it's just going to cruise. Like it's going to be a slam dunk once the legislation reaches the house and it comes up for debate in 2012. And what's the fear setting this up for this not happening?

So what actually ended up happening is that members of Rebecca Harris's own party filibustered the bill. Oh, why? Roman, you may be disappointed to hear this, but it's all because of your friends in Scotland. Oh, I want to hear their take on it because usually me and Scott see I and most things.

They're pretty much on the same page always. I think. Yeah. So Roman, I mean, just think about where like Scotland is geographically in the UK.

So where is it? Like if you look at a map in the UK. North of England. So they have a different climate from the legislators down in England who are putting this forward.

And for them, the idea of having later later mostly means that they're going to have much later sunrises than everybody else. So the whole line was we're about to have another referendum on Scotland staying in the United Kingdom. And this feels like it is those big bad politicians down in London making Scotland live a certain way. And this is government overreach and it's like ammunition for these people who are campaigning for Scottish independence.

So all of a sudden, there's a couple of MPs who are like, oh, well, the most important thing is we have to make sure Scotland stays in the UK. So that's how we end up seeing a couple of rogue MPs turning on this bill. Roman, have you ever heard of a guy named Jacob Reesmog? No.

So Jacob Reesmog is a politician in the UK who is very pro-Brexit. He's a very prominent person and Boris Johnson's government. He's the house leader. But for our purposes, the reason he's important is because he's a gigantic troll.

And Jacob Reesmog came out very much against this bill. The problem with daylight saving bills is it doesn't save any daylight because there's only a limited amount and in the winter, not a lot of it. And I think changing the clocks is a basically a fruitless exercise. So Jacob Reesmog being a giant political troll decides the best thing that he can do is basically put in a poison pill amendment to try and kill this legislation.

So he proposes that Somerset, the area he represents in England, should have its own time zone that is 15 minutes behind the rest of the United Kingdom. And it was this very attention grabbing idea. Suddenly people weren't talking about the saving time anymore. They were talking about the idea of Somerset time and Jacob Reesmog went on the BBC to explain it and also kind of get a light ribbing for proposing this idea.

I mean, if I'm wrong, but as I said, always been 15 minutes behind the rest of this. In many ways, Somerset is ahead of the rest of the country and a leader in all things. What you're trying to do is sabotage the bill to move the clocks forward, correct? Basically, yes.

The bill comes up for debate and they spend a lot of time talking about Scotland a little bit of time talking about the joke idea in Somerset. But in the end, the dissident MPs are able to talk out the bill. Basically, they just debate it long enough that the clock runs out and the bill just dies. So that there's really like a classic filibuster.

They like ran off the clock from talking and that exactly that died. So there is sort of widespread support. There's some valid reasons to not because I'm always on the side of Scotland today. And then there's some invalid reasons to not do it like this trolly guy.

So where are the options now? Well, the UK isn't getting a second time zone. They aren't going to give Scotland its own time zone which could solve some of these problems. And the government has said they're not taking up the daylight saving issue anytime soon.

And even if they did implement later later, there's no guarantee even with all the support that it has. There's no guarantee that it would be popular because there's something I have been holding back for me, Roman. And that is that the UK has actually tried this before. So during World War II to save energy, they tried switching to double summertime.

And I talked to our expert David Preyrau about this and he told me people just really hated the dark mornings. It was considered a wartime measure by a lot of people. A lot of people, especially the rural people who again still had a very large political influence. A lot of them felt it was a very disruptive to their situation and were willing to accept it during the war.

So why was it over? They want to get rid of it right away. And that's not the only experiment that hasn't worked. So the UK also tried permanent daylight saving time in the 60s.

So they basically didn't change the clocks. They just had the later evenings in the winter and people didn't like that. And they switched back. And here's the wild thing.

The United States tried it during the energy crisis in the seven. I have no idea. And people didn't like that either. And every time this happens, despite all benefits, despite saving energy and being better for exercise and saving lives, the dark mornings are the thing that people always complain about.

It's really interesting that everyone thinks that they want this new thing. And when they get it, they really hate it. Yeah. And people keep thinking that they'll figure out the best way to fill what they like saving.

And we have these examples in the United States and the United Kingdom where we tried something else. We tried the later evenings and then gone back to the system that we already have. Right. Oh, my goodness.

And David Preyrau, our expert, he thinks the system we have now is pretty good. And he gets why people keep messing with it. But basically all he wants is that people look at history and have a better debate about it. At this point, I have sort of a mission to at least try to get states and federal government, if they're talking about making changes, to make changes based on facts and reality and history, and not just on surface knowledge.

And if they do that, that's fine with me. Because I don't mind whatever they choose as long as they choose after having considered all the options. I like him. He's like from the 99PI school design.

Think about what you're doing. Listen to history. You know, but it can be changed. Everything's in a continuum.

But you just have to think about it. Don't just react. That's so good. Thank you, Chris.

Thanks, Roman. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Kurt Kullstead, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lei and Chris Baroubaier, music by our director of Sound Sean Rial. Mixed by Carolina Rodriguez. The Lady Hall is executive producer, Russ the team.

Is Christopher Johnson, Washomadon, Kagan Mingle, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars on the show at 9.9PI.org.

On Instagram and Reddit too. You can find other shows I love from Stitcher on our website, 9iPI.org, including Conan O'Brien, Needs a Friend. If you listen to the episode with Will Arnett, you will hear them make fun of 99% Invisible. But if you want to listen to or read a bunch more stories about design, look no further at 99PI.org.

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