Dr. Judy Orr was bothered by something that happened every single New Year’s Eve, and she was determined to fix it.

When her husband was posted to Fort Benning, Judy and Gerald Orr moved from their home town of Kermit, Texas to Phenix City, Alabama. It was a two-day trek of some 1,057 miles, taking them clear across four states. The night they arrived, Judy called her mother after dinner, and was astonished to find not only that the sun was still shining back home, but that it was half-past eight in both places: they hadn’t left the Central Time Zone, even though they’d traversed more than 1/24th the circumference of the earth. Yet when Gerald went to work, crossing the Chattahoochee River from Alabama into Georgia, he’d lose an hour every morning and recover it every night, by dipping in and out of the Eastern Time Zone that governed Georgia. But nothing was more unsettling than New Year’s Eve, when every December 31, Judy would hear the cheering revelers welcoming in the new year at the waterfront bar, a stone’s throw from her window, right across the river in Columbus — and not at midnight, but at precisely 11:00pm.

In truth, the new year arrives for each of us at a slightly different moment, depending on our longitude on the earth. Railway engineers discovered this the hard way in the nineteenth century, when trains would miss connections (or worse, collide) owing to even small disagreements between pocket watches set in Boston or Worcester. The Standard Time Act of 1918 put an end to this, but created situations like the ones that bedeviled Dr. Orr. In 1975, she prototyped these devices that keyed off the omega radio navigation system to identify a person’s location in space, and from this calculate their exact de facto location in time, not the de jure hour mandated by the government. While she proposed a number of use cases for such information, from astronomical observation to religious rite, her principal hope was to ring in the new year the right way, as indeed do we all.

Published December 31, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.