Original subtitles

(clicking and rattling)

- Here it is. Here's the original one.

I think there's this misnomer that my orange coat is dead,

but no, it's just dying quickly.

There's just a good amount of this going on.

But I think this thing has a couple more years, for sure.

(dramatic music)

So this is my desk.

I sit here all day and I work and I look at this map.

Whenever I'm daydreaming, I just look at this map.

(dramatic music)

I bought this map off eBay

and it was in like an elementary school,

and now it's in my office.

I notice something every time I look at it

that kind of irks me.

That something is this, this zero.

This zero, which is not just one number,

but it's actually a corresponding line that looks like this.

(rumbling)

Let's back up here for a second.

The earth is divided into lines.

(upbeat music)

Sometimes they're curved like they are on my map,

and whether or not they're curved or straight

has to do with this concept of projection,

which I'm not going to talk about here.

I've talked about plenty using a knife and a globe

back in an old Vox video that I made.

But just know that the earth is divided up into lines,

latitude and longitude lines.

Ones that go up and down and ones that go from side to side.

All of these lines in the grid

have a number associated with them.

So for the up and down lines, there's a zero point.

And then anywhere to the right of that or east of that

starts to go up from zero to 180,

with a little E next to it for east of the zero line,

and then everything to the left or the west of it

has the same thing, zero to 180 with a W for west.

Okay, that center point is the zero point

from which all east and west things are measured.

The same thing for these side to side lines.

If you go up from here,

you're gonna start to get higher and higher

until you get to 180 degrees north.

Or if you go south, you will go 180 degrees south,

which is the south pole.

Finding out where the zero point should be

for these horizontal lines is actually quite easy.

The earth has these two natural poles,

which make for a natural top and bottom of the earth,

and halfway in between those two poles,

you have this perfect center point, the equator,

which is a very natural place to put this zero point

and to measure everything from.

The up and down lines are totally arbitrary,

where you decide them, like, who's the say that, like,

it couldn't be right here in Russia, and this could be zero,

and everything could go west and east from here,

or Japan for that matter?

Well, in fact, a long time ago, that's how it used to be.

These maps with these grids were really, really important

for navigating the world.

And so everyone had to choose a zero point.

And most would just make their capital

or their home base the zero point.

If you lived in Japan,

you would just make Japan the zero point

and the rest of the coordinates would be measured

against that one zero point, which was Japan.

And same if you lived in France or Washington, D.C.

This was fine because back then countries kind of just

fought wars and competed with each other.

They weren't really collaborating or aligning

or trading as much as they do today.

And so everyone could just have their own maps

centered around their place and they did just fine.

But then around the 1800s, a few things started to happen

that completely changed everything.

(dramatic music)

First, countries and empires,

instead of just competing and fighting with each other

started to actually say like,

we should align with each other and trade and be friends

because that's better for everyone.

Pair this with the fact that map making and sea navigation

was becoming like a big industry.

It was no longer just the king ordering maps

to be made for their like expeditions.

But now it was like private businesses

going out and doing things that private businesses do.

(screeching)

And so there was now like a demand for good seafaring maps.

In short, map making was trending.

Seems like a pretty good time to be alive.

Okay, and there was one more thing

that was happening around this time

that was super important, which is, this:

(upbeat music)

Trains, trains everywhere.

Trains will just like popping up everywhere.

And trains were also trending.

People were now able to travel like across the country,

not just like on their horses,

but on this whole system of trains

where you could buy a ticket, get on a train,

and end up somewhere hundreds of miles away.

And you know, what trains run on,

besides coal, is time, timetables, schedules.

How do you know when your train is going to arrive

and when it's gonna leave and when it's gonna get there?

Time, some universal set time.

The problem is, back in the 1800s,

there was no universal set time.

Check out this piece of paper.

Today, all of these cities and towns would be

just on Eastern Standard Time, one time zone.

But back then, every town had their own time,

depending on when it was noon for them.

If they were a little bit east or a little bit west of here,

that would be different than in Washington, D.C.

Total nightmare for trains.

The lifeblood of trains is time.

And this time mish-mash just wasn't gonna work.

Okay, so what does all of this have to do with this?

Look at this guy.

(dramatic music)

You probably don't know who this person is.

I didn't know who this person was.

He was the US president that no one remembers.

This US president in the late 1800s

saw a problem with all of this.

He realized that having a bunch of different maps

with a bunch of different zero points

based on whoever was making it was a problem.

And he realized that not having a universal time zone

or some sort of universal way

of making the same time for everyone was also a problem.

So he invited 41 countries to come here to Washington D.C.,

where I live, and to sit around and think

and talk about where this zero point should be.

Where should the center of the world be

so that we can measure time as well as navigation.

All maps could be normalized to this one spot.

So after a moment of a bunch of white dudes

sitting around in a room in Washington, D.C.,

which is kind of what's happening today in Washington, D.C.,

they came to a vote.

And that vote almost unanimously said

that the zero line should be right here.

(dramatic music)

This line, if you zoom in,

goes right through London, England.

It actually goes through a little outskirts town

called Greenwich.

Greenwich is the home of the Royal Observatory

of the British Empire.

This would be the place where the Prime Meridian,

or the zero point for the entire world,

east and west, would start.

Every country at the conference agreed

that this should be the case,

except for the Dominican Republic,

at that time called Santo Domingo.

They said, no, they were the one country

that didn't like this proposal.

And France and Brazil actually abstained diplomatically,

which was kind of them saying like,

"Oh, we don't agree with this."

France continued to make their maps

with Paris as the center point,

but eventually they got on board as well.

So that gets to the crux of my big question

of why the zero right there,

which is a bunch of people voted on it.

But why were they so down with Britain having the zero point

being the center of the world?

Well, the answer is because it was 1884

and Britain was just really good at the ocean.

The British Empire was by far the biggest,

most powerful navy that had the most experience

with maps and ocean-faring.

And so it was kind of a natural choice to let Britain,

the king of the ocean, have this center point.

And from then on, maps started to be drafted with Greenwich,

this Royal Observatory, as the center point

for the east/west divide in the world.

Over time, this exact point, exactly where it's drawn,

has shifted a tiny bit because of better tools

to measure things.

And so it's actually like not literally

on the Royal Observatory anymore,

but it's effectively in the same place

that was drawn in this 1884 conference.

But they also established that all time in the entire world

would be measured against this same spot, Greenwich.

Noon at Greenwich, at the Royal Observatory,

would be the peg against which all other time was set.

They called this Greenwich Mean Time.

So you end up getting a map that looks like this.

(dramatic music)

Zoom in and you see Greenwich is right here.

That's GMT, Greenwich Mean Time, okay?

You go west of here and you start to get GMT minus one

or minus two, minus three.

You can come all the way back

to the east coast of the United States.

And this time zone is Greenwich meantime,

minus five right now, sometimes it's minus four,

if there's daylight savings,

and daylight savings is dumb and whatever,

but you get the idea.

The more you go west, you go back from Greenwich Mean Time.

If you go east, it's the opposite.

You go forward of Greenwich Mean Time.

So if it's noon at Greenwich, then this next time zone,

it would be 1:00 pm, 2:00 pm, 3:00 pm, 4:00 pm, et cetera.

So these time zones have been marked up

in these kind of strange shapes.

Eventually, if you go 12 steps away from Greenwich,

12 time zones, you'll end up here, at this mess.

This mess is the International Date Line.

This is where Greenwich Mean Time,

plus 12 or minus 12 ends up at this line,

which is where a new day starts.

So let me give you an example of what this would look like.

Imagine it's 4:00 pm in Greenwich, England,

right here at this Royal Observatory.

It is 4:00 pm GMT on May 28th.

If anyone wants to send me a birthday gift,

May 28th, May 28th.

It's May 28th at 4:00 pm GMT, Greenwich, Mean Time.

Sitting, chilling in the Royal Observatory,

which I've never actually been to.

I need to go to the Royal Observatory.

I need to go to the Royal Observatory.

I'm going to do that this year, next year, at some point.

Okay. So it's 4:00 pm, May 28th.

Across the ocean here in Washington, D.C., at that time,

you can see that we go from 4:00 pm minus five, so 11:00 am.

Okay, so it's 11:00 am here in Washington, D.C.

at that exact time on May 28th.

Head across the United States

to the west coast of the United States,

to Seattle or Portland, and right there,

it's three hours earlier than it is here.

And you're now at 8:00 am. So it's 8:00 am here.

It's still 4:00 pm in Greenwich.

It's still 4:00 pm in London.

Now you head into the Pacific Ocean.

Keep going west until you get to French Polynesia,

at which time it's five in the morning.

You're now at GMT minus 11. It's five in the morning.

And then you get right up to this messy line.

If you were to be in the Baker Islands,

which is like a US, like random uninhabited island

in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you would be at 4:00 am.

So it's 4:00 pm over in Greenwich.

It's 4:00 am on this random island in the Pacific.

So then cross this messy looking line.

It's still 4:00 am, but now it's the next day.

It's May 29th at 4:00 am.

Here in Fiji at the same time, 4:00 pm at Greenwich,

it's now 4:00 am the next day, May 29th.

So we went from being 12 hours behind Greenwich

to being 12 hours in front of Greenwich,

just by going over this International Date Line.

You could do this exact same thing going the other way.

Start heading east, and you see that, you know,

it's 5:00 pm and 6:00 pm and 7:00 pm.

Head all the way over into Asia,

and now you're getting closer to seeing

how that 4:00 am happens when you get over to Fiji.

Now, the caveat to all of this is, of course,

is that some of these countries switch by an hour

for like daylight savings type things and whatever,

but ignore that.

Imagine there wasn't daylight savings.

Right now, in this moment, where daylight savings is,

at least in the United States,

this holds across the whole world.

Someday I'll make a video about this whole messy debacle.

But the point of all of this is to say

that because of this conference in 1884

to reconcile train timetables and to make maps more uniform,

we now have this navigation and time system

that rules our whole world.

And Britain is just sitting at the center of it, of course.

The British Empire may have fallen

and the world has moved on

from Britain being the center of the world in a lot of ways,

but it's still technically the center of the world

in a lot of ways,

I'm gonna put some links in the description

for some of these cool tools

that kind of help visualize time zones,

if you're interested in that sort of thing.

But yeah, my question has been answered.

I actually didn't know the answer to this question.

And I went on a deep dive and now I know.

So now I'll sit at my desk and I will know the answer

to why the zero, and I think that was worth it.

So thanks.

Big thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video.

Skillshare is this giant repository of online tutorials

where you can subscribe and have unlimited access

to tutorials about everything you can imagine

from design to entrepreneurial skills,

to photography, videography, it's all there.

I learned everything I know with online tools,

including Skillshare,

and I really believe in the model of online learning.

There's one course in particular that I would recommend,

which is this Premiere starting course.

I remember the year I switched over to Premiere

from Final Cut Pro to edit my videos.

I knew a lot about the fundamentals of editing,

but I found that going through a course

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and refreshes all of the kind of fundamentals of editing

was really important.

So even if you are like an editor who's experienced,

I think there's great value in going through

and getting a holistic view of what Premier can do

and some of the tricks and tips that maybe you didn't learn

if you haven't done any sort of formal trainings.

Because they sponsored this video,

they're giving all of you two months free

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So you can try it out, see if it's a good for you.

So click the link in the description

to get those two months free, test it out,

see if you like it.

Thank you, Skillshare, for sponsoring

and thank you all for watching.

I will see you in another video sometime in the future.

(upbeat music)