What’s the time? - Marcus Brigstocke, Leon Lobo, Louise Devoy

Clapping Leon, Leon, Leon, Leon...

Oh.

Leon, I just wanted to pick up on, because Robin thought that that question, why do we need to know the time-

Yes.

... was kind of a, a silly question.

Yes.

Somehow, there's an obvious answer.

But may I ask you a question?

I can tell you about why we need the time now.

Pretty much everything we do in, in our daily lives, underneath all of it, all our digital infrastructure relies on time f- to, to operate, whether it's the show being broadcast when it does, or whether it's how we got here with satnav, or whether it is we got our tickets for the trains and paying for that.

Everything that we rely on these days from, from a digital perspective is underpinned by time for synchronization typically.

But it's everywhere.

Louise, historically, uh, when, when do we start to see, uh, any care, let's say, in terms of synchronizing time across, across a country and then across the world?

world?Sure.

I mean, Leon raises a really good example with the railways here in the UK.

So in 1847, the railway companies all decided to use Greenwich Mean Time across the whole network.

Because originally, the timetables were based on the railway terminus, whether that was in Cardiff, Liverpool, or wherever.

So you'd have about a 30-minute variation across the whole country.

So trying to get a train from Liverpool to London was just impossible.

You'd miss your connection.

We- we'd love a 30-minute variation.

(laughs)

Yeah, yeah.

Ramon?

I was gonna say, I mean, I don't wanna challenge the proper experts on this, but, y- y- y- you may be aware of this already, Southern Rail use an entirely different-