As the name would suggest, the SS Warrimoo is Australian.....that name is clearly from Australia!!
But this is not regarding a local name for a ship, this is a true story of a RARE opportunity that was available for a few people to experience historically.
Firstly we need to understand a little Geography, before we show that it is indeed possible to be in 2 places and times at the same time!
- The Equator: Zero degrees latitude is the imaginary line called the equator. It is what devides the earth into a North and South. These 2 sides are called hemispheres
- Dateline: The Prime Meridian is the agreed line at zero degrees longitude, that is where the day or world time starts and divides the earth into east and west hemispheres.
Now that we understand this, lets gets back to the Warrimoo.
The SS Warrimoo was on a trip from Vancouver to Australia. Captain john Phillips was just made aware of where they were on the ocean, and at that point he Warrimoo's position was latitude 0 degrees x 31 minutes north and longitude 179 degrees x 30 minutes west.
The date was 30 December 1899!
Captain Phillips could make this a trip of a lifetime and decided to make history so to say.
On a clear night, he changed course of the ship to the exact point where the international date line (Prime Meridian) and the Equator meet.
By so doing he and the ship were in a strange place, especially due to the date they did this on. Lets look at the amazing point and time they were now part o. The graphic depiction is as below.
The ship because of where it was was therefore in:
- 2 different days (because of being on both sides of the Prime meridian)
- 2 different months (December and January)
- 2 different years (1899 and 1900)
- 2 different centuries (aft was in 31st December 1899 and the bow was in 1 January 1900)
- 2 different seasons (Northern and Southern hemisphere seasons) Bow was in the Southern hemisphere and in the middle of summer, and the aft was in the Northern hemisphere and in the middle of winter.
What an awesome opportunity that was taken!! I love the thought that if they could have moved quickly from one part of the ship to another, they would in fact move backwards through time to the previous day and century, thus travelling back in time for a second.
In 1895, Mark Twain was onboard the SS Warrimoo and when he crossed the same area as mentioned above, he penned the following:
While we were crossing the 180th meridian it was Sunday in the stern of the ship where my family were, and Tuesday in the bow where I was. They were there eating the half of a fresh apple on the 8th, and I was at the same time eating the other half of it on the 10th–and I could notice how stale it was, already. The family were the same age that they were when I had left them five minutes before, but I was a day older now than I was then. The day they were living in stretched behind them half way round the globe, across the Pacific Ocean and America and Europe; the day I was living in stretched in front of me around the other half to meet it.
Along about the moment that we were crossing the Great Meridian a child was born in the steerage, and now there is no way to tell which day it was born on. The nurse thinks it was Sunday, the surgeon thinks it was Tuesday. The child will never know its own birthday. It will always be choosing first one and then the other, and will never be able to make up
its mind permanently. This will breed vacillation and uncertainty in its opinions about religion, and politics, and business, and sweethearts, and everything, and will undermine its principles, and rot them away, and make the poor thing characterless, and its success in life impossible.
Great sense of humour in that, and I would have loved the uniqueness of the experience.
Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.
Cheers all
[Image and information credit is http://www.tpaa.com.au, Wikipedia, pinterest