I have read about how to do this and most come up with this solution. I just want to display the time format.
$starttime = \"1899-12-30 06:52:47\";
As mentioned in the comments your date is before the unix epoch. DateTime() allows you to work around that.
$dt = new DateTime("1899-12-30 06:52:47"); echo $dt->format("h:i:s");