Standardization of Time

Guest: Richard J. Evans, DPhil, Historian and President of Wolfson College at Cambridge If you wonder aloud, “What time is it?” all the people around you could pull out their smart phones and tell you the exact same time. Smart phones have been around long enough now that we take for granted that they’ll spring ahead for Daylight Saving Time, reset themselves when we cross a time zone, and that the time on your neighbor’s phone will be synchronized with the time on mine.  But, in historical terms, it really wasn’t that long ago that people didn’t feel the need to keep time at all. Many clocks, when they were used, only had an hour hand. So, what changed about us that prompted such a dramatic change in the way we track time?