Time zones

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

I thought all this happened years earlier

 

Back in the day, before trains and planes and cars, people didn't really care about time differences.

They just used the sun as their clock, and set their watches to noon when the sun was at its highest point in the sky.

That worked fine for local stuff, but it got messy when people started traveling long distances.

Imagine trying to catch a train that runs on a different time than yours. That would be a nightmare, right?

Well, that's exactly what happened to Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian engineer who worked on the railways.

In 1876, he missed his train because his watch was off by a few minutes from the local time.

He was so annoyed by this that he decided to come up with a better system for keeping time around the world.

He proposed dividing the globe into 24 time zones, each one hour apart from the next.

He based his idea on the fact that the earth rotates once every 24 hours, and there are 360 degrees of longitude, so each hour corresponds to 15 degrees of longitude.

He also chose Greenwich, England as the starting point for his time zones, because that's where the prime meridian is located.

His idea was pretty brilliant, and it caught on quickly among the railroad companies, who needed a standard way to schedule their trains.

In 1883, they adopted Fleming's time zones in North America, and called it "the day of two noons" because some places had to adjust their clocks by more than an hour.

A year later, an international conference in Washington D.C. agreed to use Fleming's system worldwide, and established Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the universal reference point.

Today, most countries use some variation of Fleming's time zones, although some have tweaked them to suit their needs.

China has only one time zone for the whole country, even though it should have five.

Australia has three time zones, but one of them is half an hour ahead of the others.

[Alpo]

I didn't know when it happened but I knew it was because of the trains. You need to make the trains run on time, and how can they run on time if you don't know what time it is?

[John Kloehr]

19 minutes ago, Alpo said:

I didn't know when it happened but I knew it was because of the trains. You need to make the trains run on time, and how can they run on time if you don't know what time it is?

You also don't want to get on a train if another train might be on the same track headed in your direction. Not sure why this motivation is not in the OP writeup, head-on train collisions was the main driver of establishing time standards.

 

Once the first telegraph terminal was laid across the Atlantic (late 1850s), coordinating time across the ocean to the markets between New York and London increased in importance.

 

This may be the actual impetus for the OP citation coordinating time globally a couple decades later. Separate form the move to coordinate time in the US for regulating which train was on what track in a certain direction.

[Father Kit Cool Gun Garth]

Based on a popular video posted by @Rye Miles #13621