•A change in the way you look at the world or how the world appears to you…
•Some sort of revelation, Eureka-aha, epiphany…
My own Christopherian encounters…
One of my most arresting experiences was seeing my first dump. We were in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on vacation during the summer. Dad and a friend were driving around with a couple of us boys.
We stopped at a dump outside of town. I'd never seen a dump before nor had I ever thought about what happened to trash, et al. (I must therefore have been quite young.)
The day was warm, sunny, and bright. Lovely green trees surrounded the dump. What we saw was utterly grotesque in my eye.
It was so ugly I couldn't comprehend it. There was so much trash it almost made me sick. Of course, it stunk. It seemed senseless.
I remember trying to ask Dad where it came from and why it had to be here. He answered, but not to my satisfaction. I couldn't stomach his answers. I urged him to leave soon.
In high school English Lit, reading Pepys' account of 1666 London fire and being amazed I could be in on it at this remove of history.
At Calvin College chapel, John DeVries talked about how India's hunger problems will not be overcome without removing the shackles of Hinduism.
Crossing the Great Plains in a car is much better than by horse, but it's still a tedious trip. I've wondered how the pioneers maintained their sanity. Some years ago on a road trip back to the Midwest (with those wide-open spaces that give one time to think), I passed the time change line someplace in Nebraska and began to wonder when time zones were devised. I knew from a sunset table I had for bird hunting that each degree of longitude equated to 15 minutes of sunlight. Yet a degree of longitude was 30 or 60 miles and farther than anyone traveling by covered wagon could cover in a day.
So when did time zones become necessary? About the time that one could notice a change in the sun, actually lack of movement if moving west. When did people start moving fast enough to be concerned if they were experiencing the day at the same rate as others? The earliest technology that transported people that fast was the train. So I figured time zones were instituted about 1860 when there was a transcontinental railroad moving people east to west or west to east faster than the sun moved across the sky and the day time would be noticeably different from the time one got on the train to the time one got off.
1 comment:
This according to the Wiki page on time zones ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone ):
“The first adoption of a standard time was on December 1, 1847, in Great Britain by railway companies using GMT kept by portable chronometers. The first of these companies to adopt standard time was the Great Western Railway (GWR) in November 1840. This quickly became known as Railway Time. About August 23, 1852, time signals were first transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Even though 98% of Great Britain's public clocks were using GMT by 1855, it was not made Britain's legal time until August 2, 1880. Some old British clocks from this period have two minute hands—one for the local time, one for GMT.”
Post a Comment