In a book I’m currently reading about German broadcasting and its use for propaganda during World War II, I read:
The first on-air directive, it seems, was a decree that Dutch time would be placed on the same footing as Berlin time.
Morley, Nathan, Radio Hitler: Nazi Airwaves in the Second World War, p108
Dutch time? Today, most of continental Western Europe – excluding Portugal – uses Central European Time, so I initially thought that at the time the Netherlands used Greenwich Mean Time to align commerce with Britain. Nope, wrong again.
Starting in May 1909 until the German invasion in May 1940, the Netherlands used Dutch Time or Amsterdam Time, which was
GMT +0h 19m 32.13s until 1 July 1937, when it was simplified to GMT +0h 20m
Wikipedia, UTC+00:20
Considering that standardized times and time zones were introduced to help railway scheduling (Railway Time), creating railway schedules between the Dutch railways and its neighbors must have been challenging.
And if you think that was weird….
If you think adding 40 minutes to the current time is wacky, how about this StackOverflow post about an unexplainable date math:
See this page for details of 1927 in Shanghai. Basically at midnight at the end of 1927, the clocks went back 5 minutes and 52 seconds. So “1927-12-31 23:54:08” actually happened twice, and it looks like Java is parsing it as the later possible instant for that local date/time – hence the difference.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracting-these-two-epoch-milli-times-in-year-1927-giving-a-strange-r
Adding insult to injury, subsequent versions of the Time Zone Database was updated to change it from 352 seconds to 358 (TZDB 2013a) seconds to 343 seconds (TZDB 2014f). Can you imagine the problems reconciling year-end books?
