Daniel opens with a joke about time zones and the future looking bright.

Then he asks the real question.

For most of human history, every town kept its own local time based on when the sun was overhead. If you were traveling by foot or horseback, the gradual difference between towns barely mattered. Trains changed everything. A railway needed a published schedule. But if every town kept its own solar time, a timetable became impossibly complicated. In the United States alone, railroad companies were using at least 75 different time standards.

One of the most famous people who pushed for a worldwide solution was a Canadian engineer named Sandford Fleming, who wrote that he missed a train in Ireland in 1876 because a timetable showed p.m. when it should have shown a.m. But he was not the only person working on the problem.

O ...