At the end of the article, there’s this interesting fact:

King Edward VII invented his own timezone for the royal estate in Sandringham, Norfolk, in 1901 to squeeze in half-an-hour more hunting time each day

  • nogooduser@lemmy.world
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    22 days ago

    You can make the time that you have more useful though.

    There are activities that you can do in the dark and some that you can’t do in the dark. I imagine that they wanted to sleep in late which was cutting into hunting time so they changed the time zone so that it was dark while they were sleeping and light a bit later to allow for more hunting.

    It’s why we have daylight saving time.

    • Steve@communick.news
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      22 days ago

      My whole life I’ve heard people say that. It’s as if they don’t realize they’re just tricking themselves.

      You can’t actually change when the sun rises or sets. You can only change the arbitrarily chosen number that time is labeled with. You’re still getting up earlier, while telling yourself you didn’t, because the number is the same. If you wanted to get up earlier you could just do that with the normal numbers. It would be exactly the same. The time change doesn’t effect anything real.

      • Zwiebel@feddit.org
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        22 days ago

        It works because certain numbers are socially ingrained. For example 8 a.m. is the normal time schools start here

      • nogooduser@lemmy.world
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        22 days ago

        It is arbitrary, yes. Part of the reason for daylight savings time was simply to match most people’s waking hours to a standard time throughout the year.