Togo Goes to Greenwich in the Mean Time

I’ve been thinking about time lately. Actually, my real interest is time travel. But my head hurts a little when I try to figure out what would happen today if I had traveled backward in time about 10 years and eaten something different for breakfast. That scenario, my friends, evokes some very scary possibilities.

Thus, I decided to step back in my in-depth research to figure out about time first. Daddy tells me that our clocks are set to Central Standard Time here in Abilene. Daddy mutters under his breath a lot when somebody somewhere throws a switch and it changes to Central Daylight Savings Time. Some of his clocks have to be changed, his sleeping patterns are disrupted, and he insists that no daylight is truly saved.

While I personally feel that Daddy needs to lighten up and not be so grumpy, I also realize that humans are obsessed with time and how grumpy they all would be if they couldn’t agree on what time it is.

I don’t know all of the ins and outs but apparently our current time system dates back to Merry Olde England in the mid-1880s. Great Britain likes ships and boats a lot. That’s understandable since it’s on an island and for many years it was impossible to get French toast without getting on a boat. In modern times, they can fly or ride through the Chunnel, a tunnel under the English Channel to get to France and their toast. This access is essential for Britains. Breakfast is truly the most important meal of the day for them. When French toast wasn’t readily available, they built their traditional breakfast around maritime standards and, thus, navy beans. That couldn’t be a coincidence.¹

But, I digress. People in England liked to sail around a lot and came to realize that it was hard to know what time it was at home when they were away. So they decided that time for the entire world should be calculated in relationship to what time it is in Greenwich, London at the Royal Observatory. Thus Greenwich Time began each day when it was midnight at the Greenwich Meridian.²

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Why is it called Greenwich Mean Time?” I was asking the same question. Apparently, the Earth is not very round and is all bumpy. And since the world tilts this way and that way, a 24-hour day doesn’t always show up at the exact location. So someone at the Royal Observatory sat around with an hour glass and calculated the average time that midnight occurred in Greenwich. If you’re a mathematics whiz, you know that another word for “average” is “mean.” Thus, the world now calculates time dividing the world into zones that allow us to know the relative solar time anywhere in the world depending on the number of hours the solar time is different from what we now know as “Greenwich Mean Time.”³

I went over all of this very carefully with Daddy. He blinked a lot as I explained it to him. And he muttered under his breath again. In the meantime (See what I did there?), I am booking a cruise to England and a tour of Greenwich for some breakfast beans.

I’m not sure that this research makes me an expert on time. But I’m available to give lectures to civic clubs and school assemblies. Contact my agent. Daddy prefers calls when the sun is up, no matter what time that is or how much daylight is being saved.

1. Navy beans are also known as haricot beans. The tradition of eating beans on toast is a foundation of the Traditional English Breakfast. The beans are baked in tomato sauce and often served on toast. (Perhaps even on English Muffins.) Personally, I think that breakfast beans were invented back before the Chunnel and ready access to French toast — thus, beans on toast. (For Americans, if you don’t have time to cook them properly, just open a can of pork ‘n’ beans, ladle out some on a piece of wheat toast, and microwave it a bit. You’ll find the recipe in my upcoming “Dining Around the World with Togo” cookbook.)

2. Originally they set the beginning of a new day at noon. But they soon realized how silly that was since everybody was already up and halfway through their day by that time.

By the way, a meridian is a giant circle that goes all the way around the Earth, passing through the North Pole and the South Pole. Even though it is an imaginary line, it is very important for navigation and, as we can see, time-keeping purposes. I wonder if Greenwich has a sign that says “Welcome to Greenwich, the hometown of the Greenwich Meridian?” It’s not as impressive as something like a giant ball of string or the biggest collection of belly button lint. But being the birthplace of time has to be worth something to the Chamber of Commerce.

3. I was relieved to learn that “Mean Time” was not a prescription for behavior.