Did You Know?
Amsterdam Fishes Fifteen Thousand Bicycles Out of the Water Every Year
Amsterdam holds a Guinness World Record for most bicycles recovered from waterways. Between 12,000 and 15,000 bikes are pulled out of the canals annually by Waternet, the city's water authority, using a hydraulic claw mounted on a crane on a barge.
The practice has its own name — fietsen vissen, bicycle fishing — and it has become a spectator activity. The claw comes up dripping with frames and handlebars and wheels, a crowd gathers, and the haul goes off to be scrapped.
For scale: Amsterdam had around 847,000 bicycles as of 2015, in a city with fewer residents than that. There are 165 canals, about 100 kilometres of water, and around 1,000 bridges. Waternet's diving colleagues also recover, on average, about 35 cars and 100 people from the canals each year.
Most of the bikes go in through theft or vandalism. But not all of it is petty. In the 1930s, Amsterdam communists threw fascists' bicycles into the Prinsengracht. And during the German occupation, resistance leaders urged Amsterdammers to dump their own bikes in the canals rather than let the occupying forces confiscate them.
Which brings us to the clock.
The clock: in 1908 the Dutch parliament passed a law defining the legal time of the entire country as the mean solar time at the Westertoren — a church tower in Amsterdam. It came into force on 1 May 1909, at GMT plus nineteen minutes and 32.13 seconds. The .13 is in the statute. An entire nation set its watch by one steeple, to a hundredth of a second.
On 1 July 1937 it was rounded off to a tidy twenty minutes.
On 16 May 1940, the occupying German forces advanced Dutch clocks to Berlin time.
The Netherlands never took it back. After liberation in 1945 the country kept Central European Time, and keeps it today. The bicycles went into the canals so the occupier could not have them, and the bicycles were eventually fished back out. The clock was not.
One trace survives. The reference time zone database still preserves, in its historical file, a line reading `0:19:32` for Europe/Amsterdam, so that historical dates can convert correctly. Somewhere in the software of the entire planet, a Dutch church tower is still keeping time.
Sources
- Guinness World Records, *Most bicycles recovered from waterways (city)* (12,000–15,000/year; 847,000 bicycles; 35 cars and 100 people)
- DutchAmsterdam.nl (Waternet, Arie Beer interview; 165 canals / 100 km)
- Wikipedia, *UTC+00:20* and IANA tz database `Europe/Amsterdam` entry (0:19:32.13; 1 July 1937 rounding; 16 May 1940 occupation change)
- R.H. van Gent, *De wettelijke tijd in Nederland* (law of 23 July 1908, Staatsblad 1908 no. 236, Westertoren)