Dear World: Let’s get rid of time zones

This is one of those weeks when, sitting here in Berlin, I feel much closer to my place of birth, New York. By one hour, to be precise. Most of the US switched to daylight savings time last weekend, whereas Germany — the first country to introduce “summertime” about a century ago — will spring forward next Sunday.
As a general rule, nothing that was originally proposed by Benjamin Franklin should be dismissed as self-evidently daft. The crafty founding father surmised that changing the clocks twice a year might nudge people to rise and go to bed earlier in the summers, thus saving candle wax. That probably seemed sensible at the time.
Nonetheless, daylight savings is an idea whose time has passed. The resetting of clocks messes with our body rhythms and creates health problems. For school children in particular, it causes a mild form of jet lag, but without the excitement of travel. For others it just adds confusion. So I’m with the many who want to stop these biannual resets.
But I’d also like to go one step further and propose getting rid of time zones altogether. I’m hardly the first to make this suggestion; the argument has been put forth sporadically for about half a century. That’s about a third of the time we’ve had time zones, incidentally.
To see how arbitrary those squiggly lines are, join me on a jaunt through history. For most of our evolution we followed natural time. We generally rose with the sun, which stirred us with the blue wavelengths of morning, then got drowsy with the redder hues of dusk, before sleeping soundly exactly when we should.
Then technology and globalization threw a spanner into this harmony. In the mid-19th century, each town and hamlet still kept its own local time, based on a sundial. But railroads started carrying folks around faster than their ancestors could have imagined, and telegraphs magically connected them across continents. People suddenly needed standardized schedules to catch a train or get a message.
In 1884, some countries therefore agreed on international time zones. The prime meridian was defined as running through a measuring device in the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in London. The rest of the world was divided into strips of 15 degrees longitude in width, neatly adding up to 24 zones, one for each hour of the day.
Once the system was devised, politicians everywhere started messing with it. The French, being French, for years refused to accept anything British as the standard. In the decentralized US, time-keeping remained a free-for-all, until Congress attempted to impose order with the Standard Time Act of 1918. That quest is ongoing: countries are still switching zones now and then.
—Bloomberg