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Planet Money

The Day of Two Noons (Classic)

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.629.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2023

⏱️ 19 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

(Note: this episode originally ran in 2019.)

In the 1800s, catching your train on time was no easy feat. Every town had its own "local time," based on the position of the sun in the sky. There were 23 local times in Indiana. 38 in Michigan. Sometimes the time changed every few minutes.

This created tons of confusion, and a few train crashes. But eventually, a high school principal, a scientist, and a railroad bureaucrat did something about it. They introduced time zones in the United States. It took some doing--they had to convince all the major cities to go along with it, get over some objections that the railroads were stepping on "God's time," and figure out how to tell everyone what time it was. But they made it happen, beginning on one day in 1883, and it stuck. It's a story about how railroads created, in all kinds of ways, the world we live in today.

This episode was originally produced by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and edited by Jacob Goldstein. Jess Jiang is Planet Money's Acting Executive Producer.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is Planet Money from NPR.

0:04.0

Hey folks, today we're going to share one of our favorite episodes of Planet Money

0:09.8

from years past.

0:11.5

It's from 2019 and it's one that I love very, very much and I think about all the time.

0:16.8

And we hope you enjoy it.

0:19.2

Here is something that I learned recently.

0:21.5

In the air above us, up at 35,000 feet, it is the same time everywhere.

0:28.8

Universal time, which is the time at the Greenwich Meridian, is used all around the planet

0:36.2

Earth today by every single airline and Air Force in the world.

0:43.6

This is Dick Henry.

0:44.9

He's an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and he said, think about it.

0:50.0

There are all these planes flying all over the Earth at hundreds of miles an hour and you

0:55.6

don't want to get confused by time zones when you're trying to keep them from crashing

1:00.1

into each other.

1:01.7

Dick has talked to his friend Steve Hanky about this for years.

1:05.8

Steve's economist, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins and he says it is

1:11.0

not just pilots who need universal time.

1:15.2

Investors need it too.

1:16.5

You can trade 24 hours a day almost around the clock and gold currencies, stocks and everything

1:24.2

else under the sun.

1:26.6

And those are all time stamped using universal time.

1:32.0

Hanky and Henry were telling me about all this because they have this little proposal.

...

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