![]() ![]() This obviously caused huge issues for travelers, especially those that traveled long distances on the trains. Almost every station set its own time, meaning that nearly every city in the States was at different times from each other. ![]() In nineteenth century Unites States, for example, the fledgling American railroad maintained many, many different time zones across its route. And because of their ability to measure time very precisely despite different conditions or speed/motion, chronometers became the instrument of choice for most mariners in the nineteenth century.ĭespite this and the developments that had occurred with longitude, many cities and towns across the world still set their clocks based on sunrise and sunset. This occurred in 1764 and, a year later, led to the now-famous Longitude Act, otherwise known at the time as the ‘Act 5 George III’. John Harrison, an English horologist, worked out that a clock could be used to precisely pinpoint a ship’s position at sea. These clocks were initially developed in the seventeenth century, but it is what happened in the following century that interests us. Based on this, you can then deduce that there are 24 time zones around the world.īelieve it or not, time zones are historically linked to pendulum clocks. There are 24 hours in a day, and 360 degrees of longitude encompassing the globe – dividing 360 by 24 gives you the 15 degrees of longitude that equates to a one-hour difference in each time zone. This is pretty easy to work out with simple mathematics. The irregularity of the time zone borders is necessary politically and for the convenience of the local populace. Time zone regions today, although roughly corresponding to fifteen degrees of longitude, conform more to national and international boundaries than to the rigid fifteen degrees longitude rule. In practice, however, this is a rather simplistic explanation, and things are not always as they seem. This gave birth to time zones, with the Greenwich Meridian becoming the first, or ‘Prime’, time zone in 1884.Īs described above, in theory, each fifteen degrees of longitude moved toward the east corresponds to moving the clock an hour forward. Because of this, the need eventually arose for a better method of timekeeping. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and the world was changing almost beyond recognition. However, the latter part of the nineteenth century is well known for the explosion of global trading, and the expansion of communication and transport that inevitably came with this. As well as this, the lack of global (and even national) communications made the need for standard timekeeping irrelevant. This was not an issue in and of itself at this time because, for the most part, the differences in time between long distances were barely noticeable due to the very long travel times taken to traverse these distances. ![]() Not counting local variations, each line of longitude is divided by fifteen degrees as a general rule and depending upon which way one travels, time moves forward or backward one hour for every fifteen degrees of longitude.īefore the late nineteenth century, most towns and cities across the world used to set their local times based on the observance of stars and the Sun. The Earth is loosely divided into 24 regions (time zones) separated by longitude. A time zone is a region with a standard time throughout that is used for all social, commercial and legal purposes within that region. ![]()
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