This is 99% invisible. 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.

At least, you know, 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

p.i colleagues for a set of many stories about our evolving relationship with

time. And to get us started, it's Kurt Colstead, the co-author of the 99

percent 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,

you know, almost like a second hand potentially, but you know, 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 you know 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

travels 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.

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