Just a few questions
1) Do you think the phone was initially invented for business or pleasure purposes?2) Why do we insist on talking about time the way we do, so that everyone who eats lunch when the sun is high in the sky talks about it in terms of 12-1pm? (Don't be pedantic if you are some crazy kid who eats lunch at 4pm or something, you get what I'm saying.) What would be the problem of us all having the same time, so wherever you were in the world you worked from the same clock, so some people would eat luuch at say 1am, or 9pm?
I'm sure there is a sensible answer to this, so really, does the whole time/date thing have to work the way it does?
posted by Lucia @ 21:38
2 Comments:
1) The Phone. It was just invented by Alexander Graham Bell. All the best inventions are just inventions! -discoveries is a better word really. The science was always there, we just didn't know about it yet. Sometimes things are found out by mistake, like cornflakes or America or penicillin. And then man decides what to do with it afterwards.
2) Time. We all have our diurnal rhythm, (as well as our monthly one). I expect if globalisation continues at the current rate, together with the shrinking of the world as travel gets faster, we could have a global time - it is probably used already at Coca Cola.
Time is the oldest invention - not a discovery - we have adopted it from the Babylonians. As our view of the sun and the horizon is increasingly obscured by buildings/working inside buildings, we need a clock to fullfil our psychological/diurnal rhythmic need to see the day passing. Having a lunch hour at 4am would not be the same!
Interesting - in the 1970's the Labour government abolished putting the clocks back for winter. It was awful! Not only was it not safe for schoolchildren going to school in the dark, those dark mornings were so depressing! Maggie Thatcher won tremendous public support by re-instating Summer/Winter-time. I think that support stayed in the public sub-conscious which is why she was such a popular leader - for the general public. I did not meet any member of the General Public who did not regret her being voted out of office.
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