A standard route, frequented by many travellers during the age of steamers (say, ~1890s until the 1950s) was the North Atlantic shipping route between the UK or France on one side and New York on the other. The time difference between the two sides of the Atlantic is five hours (France was on GMT until 1940), and a typical crossing would take a bit less than a week. That means that passengers would have to cope with a “jetlag” of about an hour per day (to my knowledge, common practice on ships was to re-set board to local time at the current position once a day). That is, of course, much less than in today’s air travel, but perhaps not entirely negligible either.
My question is whether it was common, during the days of transoceanic passenger ships, to complain about “jetlag” (whatever the word was at the time), and in particular whether there are literary references to it, or whether it was just shrugged off as something that would not even be felt over the course of the several days of the voyage.
There is no “shiplag” because the body can easily adjust to a ~4% difference in the length of the day. If you have to get up an hour earlier or stay up an extra hour while at home, you would barely feel it.
I dispute the last part: witness people complaining whenever daylight saving goes into or out of effect, not to mention the studies that supposedly show real medical consequences in the days after this happens.
I’d agree that it would be a lot less noticable, especially if breakfast wasn’t served on a strict timetable and there were no nighttime activities to keep people from getting up and sleeping when they wanted.
Anecdotally, when I drive out West, slightly more than 1 time zone per day, it takes several days for my body to “adjust” to the new time, and I put that in quotes because in my case, wanting to start hiking early in the morning, it’s actually good that 5 am feels like 7 am.
I think part of it is that as a passenger, you have nowhere to be at a certain time. There were no emails or Zoom meetings that you still had to take, you were no vacation with little tying you to the outside world unlike the DST transition where you still needed to get to work.
As far as own internal clock goes, it takes me between .5 and 1 day per time zone to reset.
I’ve heard a guideline that it takes about day per ‘displaced’ hour to adjust back from jetlag, though each person is difference. On a ship that takes 5 days to do 5 time zones I think it wouldn’t be much of a issue for most.
That was exactly my thinking. Many people are uneasy for a day of so after the transition between winter time and DST (or vice versa), and a transatlantic crossing by ship would effectively mean having five or six such switches on consecutive days.
I’ve only been on a couple of ‘rough’ water crossings, and I’ve been on a few medium-long train journeys. The travel itself can be pretty bouncy, and that means that a body is probably constantly trying to constantly maintain some kind of balance - while not exhausting, it’s a bit tiring at times. Which is to say, I’d suspect that the other rigours of travel to be more or less indistinguishable from any time zone adjustment disruption.
I know that the original way they did longitude on a ship was to take two clocks- one set to the time in London (GMT), and one that they reset each day at local noon as determined by a sextant. The difference between the two times in hours x 15 equals the number of degrees west or east.
So I don’t know if they reset the time each day for passengers or crew, but they are aware of the difference.
I’d think the best thing to do would be to just set the ship’s time for passengers to destination time, and let everyone de-lag during the trip.
The transatlantic liners like The Queen Mary or the SS United States would adjust their clocks at midnight. On the West-East leg, the clocks would be stopped for one hour each night and in the other direction, the clocks go back to midnight at one am.
I can only imagine what impact there would be on scheduled activities if passengers didn’t change their clocks. I mean, if the shuffleboard tournament was scheduled for 11:00, wouldn’t some people otherwise show up at noon or 10:00 or whatever?
OTOH ship staff would have to remind passengers what time to set their clocks each day, and I suspect more than once each day. I know more than one person who knows what time it is in Chicago and can never quite figure out the time in San Francisco or New York.
Um, the steward leaves a pre-printed card in your stateroom announcing the time change the night before. People manage to show up for shuffleboard or dinner reservations at the correct time.
Given how many people there are who don’t know what to reset their clocks to when going on and off daylight savings, and the number of people who think that when it’s nine in LA it’s six in NYC, it is hard to imagine.
Here’s screenshots from a game developer creating a 3D model of the entire Titanic.
Note the sixth rendering down, underneath the ship’s clock is a sign
“This Clock Will Be Set
[Backward]
At Midnight
[4][9]
Minutes”
With the bracketed characters changeable. Presumably you took note of the sign and reset your watch for the next day before going to bed.
As a side note the game’s demo (they’ve modeled the engine room and most of the common areas) is absolutely stunning on my Oculus Rift.
I’ll say that when I was a stockbroker on the phone, I can’t tell you the amount of times every day I would give the hours of the stock market in eastern time, as we were always told to do.
I still found it amazing that so many people in Pacific time seemed stunned about how to convert it. Really? You’re 50 years old and the concept of time zones is foreign to you? Like it or not, the USA is still based off of Eastern Time. Oh and course, I can look at their call history and
notice that they always call right at market open for endless quotes and news.
