Why the International Date Line Looks So Stupid

I am retired USAF. I left Japan around noon, flew back to the States. My mother in law asked when did I leave. I looked at the clock on the wall and replied, "In about 20 minutes." I love ttime travel.

Two things that need to be mentioned: 1. When Alaska was transferred from Russia to the US, it didn't go back 1 day, it went forward by 11 days! That's because Russia still used the Julian Calendar at the time, which was 12 days behind the Gregorian Calendar at that time. So at the time of the ceremony, the date moved 11 days forward (12 days from the difference in calendars minus 1 due to the change in the IDL) from October 7, 1867 to October 18, 1867. 2. The setting up of time zones and the IDL were not just the result of shipping schedules, but also train schedules. Until time zones were implemented by the conference mentioned in the video, every settlement had its own time zone, determined by its local solar noon. This meant there were effectively 1440 mini time zones around the world, one for each minute. Before fast travel by trains, instantaneous communication by telegraph, and precision time keeping devices, this didn't matter much since who cared if you lost a minute walking an hour to the nearest town. But with train schedules set to local noon, they were a mess to try to navigate, especially when some train companies set their schedules by their main hub city's local noon (which would often conflict with the stations' local noons, and the schedules of other companies who were based out of different cities with a different local noons). Thus the hourly time zones (and the IDL) were created to put a stop to all chaos and standardize things to a much simpler 24 time zones to keep track of.

Fun fact. When flying Qantas... up until too many Karen's started complaining in the late 90's, most of their pilots deliberately climbed 500ft, then decended 500ft when crossing the Date Line as a joke... calling it a speed bump as they crossed the pacific.

It's also fun to see a UTC +14 when +12 and -12 should theoratically be the maximum and minimum 😅

The fact that these countries deleted weekends and not a business day, must have really sucked for residents.

Yeah that time travel feeling is ridiculous. Every time I visited my home in NYC from Japan, I'd fly 12-14hrs and arrive in NYC at about the same time on the same day that I left Tokyo. It was absolute havoc on my circadian rhythms

deleting a saturday instead of a monday is just evil

It may seem arbitrary and stupid but as goofy as many of these edge cases may seem, it's the only way time zones can work with global trade. Losing 2 days of trade per week with close neighbors is devastating and having a goofy looking line most people never have to think about or look at is a small price to pay for a functioning economy.

I like these super informative videos that aren't just discussing death and destruction. I think a good mix of these two types of videos really works well

Individual timezone lines are a lot weirder, though usually for the same reasons. Like China being all in a single timezone, or Russia stretching some of them a bit. There are also small places like Nepal which have 15-minute offsets.

18:16 I remember at the time the Kiribati government also made a big deal of the tourism potential, for those who wanted to be the very first to celebrate the new millennium. PS, the “ti” is pronounced close to “s”. Kiritimati is the closest you can get in the local language to “Christmas”. Named so because captain Cook visited the island on Christmas eve. The name of the country “Kiribati” is the local rendering of “Gilbert”.

In 1994 I went to 2 new years parties with 2 separate countdowns. One in Beijing and one in Houston. That was a unique couple of days. I was literally a "time traveler" :)

Just for the record, "Kiritimati" is pronounced "Christmas." It's actually a direct transliteration of the word "Christmas" in Gilbertese, where "ti" and "si" are the same sound.

China originally had 5 time zones, from 5-10 hours ahead of GMT or GMT +5 -> +10, but then in the 1986 it was decided to make it only one that follows the Beijing Standard time, which is GMT +8. Which means that if you walk from the westernmost point of the country over to Afghanistan at 8am, you will reach the other side at 4:30am.

I love the timing of this video. Just crossed the date line on a ship and I'm experiencing my second Monday, November 6 right now.

This has to be one of the most fascinating real-life board game scenarios I ever heard of. I'm even more amazed the entire planet decided on the date line to begin with. How were the countries informed of meeting? That's a movie I would actually like to watch.

1:54 The Line Islands (Kiribati) are an entire 24 hours ahead of Hawaii, not behind. 6:54 Really, Greenwhich? 22:00 Assuming a Mon-Fri working week, they had four common business days per week, not just three: Mon-Thu in Samoa, i.e. Tue-Fri in Australia. 23:29 American Samoa is 20+ hours behind Sydney and its neighbouring independent Samoa, not ahead.

I honestly think that this video was a breath of fresh air after all the geopolitical videos on this channel.

Absolutely no chance of me coming into work on that Monday after they stole my Saturday away from me😂

As a Filipino, I now know where the concept of "Filipino time" comes from. Thank you, RealLifeLore.