My favorite is Amsterdam Time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B00:20

> The exact timezone was GMT +0h 19m 32.13s until March 17, 1937...

Yes, 32.13 seconds.

It seems arbitrary, but I think it was similarly defined as GMT considering their location (Wikipedia: 52°22′N 4°54′E):

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%284%C2%B054%27%2F360%C...

It would yield GMT +0h 19m 36s to the above location. I assume it was tied to a more precise point inside Amsterdam which would give you the 32.13 seconds.

Wow, TIL. Any idea why?

Every town used to have their own local time based on the sun being at zenith at local noon. For example, a place like Oxford would be a few minutes behind London.

With the advent of railways, it became necessary to standardize things a bit. You can imagine the difficulty if each town a train stopped in had its own timezone!

There's an interesting podcast from BBC that covers this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/u6Qnc25jQ5OI...

Almost certainly solar time.

We had software choke on a birth date once. For some reason these were sent in milliseconds, and that particular instance, midnight July 1st, 1937 didn't exist for this particular locale. At that time, the time was changed to a different meridian, and the clock was moved forward a few seconds.

In the 1940s, the nazis set all of occupied Europe to Berlin time, and it stuck. Before that time, Europe had a large number of time zones.

I'm just speculating, but maybe that is the actual time difference from Greenwich.

At least windows recognizes you as a time zone.

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/canada/fort-st-john

I have to communicate to my peers that we live in Arizona because Windows doesn't have anything.

I imagine timekeeping isn't a primary concern at the moment :(