Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast brought to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Anna, I'm joined today by fellow QI elves James Harkin and Andrew Hunter Murray and also special guest today historian and horrible histories writer Greg Jenner who has a book to plug. Correct?

Yes, plug plug plug. It's called a million years in a day and it's out like now. Now it's quite good. It is good. Some of us have read at least bits of it. It's amazing.

I'm going to go that far but it's alright. It's above average. I would say it's definitely sort of top 70%ile. You know, like, you know, it's a 2-1.

Okay. A high 2-1 book by it. Okay, let's get on with the show.

And for fact number one, let's go to you, Greg.

Okay, so my fact is from my book because I am that's unimaginative and my fact is in the 1960s in America there was one particular bus routes that was only 35 miles long but during that time passengers passed through seven different time zones. Wow. That's amazing.

How does that work? Right, so it's fairly complicated. So I'm going to have to give you probably a bit of context. Okay. So this is all to do with daylight saving time, which is something we have here of course in Britain and it's a familiar concept to all of us.

But it was an idea first put forward about a hundred years ago by William Willett who was a moustache-showed Englishman. He was also the ancestor of Chris Martin from Coldplay. You know, for your fans.

Who wrote clocks? Exactly. There we go, see. So he put that forward in about 1909 I think. And he was arguing for trying to get more daylight into the time.

So everyone was nice idea and principle, but it sounds very complicated. We're not going to do it. And then in 1915 he died and everyone was sort of mocking him and the idea was going nowhere. And then Germany picked up with the idea and said, this is a brilliant idea. We will do this.

They did it during the war. Then they did it during the war. And it was like it saved them energy. Yeah, because it's that extra hour of daylight meant you didn't have to burn loads of gas and oil and that could then go to the war effort.

So when he died, did everyone miss his funeral by an hour? So as soon as Germany adopted it, Britain very sheepishly went, maybe we should do that as well. And it became known as Willett Time, which is like Hammer Time, but looking with the stash I think.

And anyway, it then spread around the world. And America adopted it and the problem with America is it's a much bigger nation than Britain. And so America has loads of time zones and it's too big. And so the government is all right, come on. Let's be sensible here. We're a federal nation to each state can decide if they're going to opt in or opt out.

And then the problem is that each of the states then said to the towns and cities, okay, you guys can also decide if you're going to opt in or opt out. And so 28 of the states opted in to DST. And then the various cities were then decide, oh, we can do it. We're not going to do it.

And so what happened is you ended up with this incredibly chaotic system. It's the point that in Idaho shops that were next door to each other might be on different times.

So in the same building, like you could literally go that next door to the corner shops. It's amazing.

This is a little 1950s and 1960s.

And so 1966, this was happening. I just want to say, how did it work with the two shops on the next to each other? It reminds me of a place I went to called Bal Hurtog on the border of the Netherlands and Belgium.

Oh, yeah, the exclave place.

Yeah, so there's loads of exclaves and the border between the two countries is really, really complicated. And they have the lines you can see on the on the pavements you can see where the lines are.

So you can like work from Belgium to Netherlands and back into Belgium and back into Netherlands again.

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