Everything in life is dictated by time, and depending on where you live, your time is different than someone someplace else. This hasn’t always been the case. How then was it determined how our time was divided up?
The origins of time zones could be traced to one particular change in transportation–the rise of the railroads. Within the late 1800s, when trains turned the favorred means of travel across the US, a problem surfaced. Passengers needed to catch their train at a selected time in their a part of the country, and trains wanted a set time so that they wouldn’t crash into every other.
Towns usually set their native time by the sun’s movement, so when trains began to chop the travel time between these towns, the time between these areas was vastly different. The railroads had to have completely different arrival and departure instances for various trains depending on the local time where the train was coming or going. It turned a scheduling mess, and a better way was needed.
The railroads have been the first to develop a time zone system in 1883 instead of counting on the federal government. They established four zones across the country; the Eastern, Central, Western, and Pacific. These zones are intently aligned with the zones we’ve got today. It wasn’t till 1918 that these time zones grew to become official under the Customary Time Act. This was additionally when daylight saving time was established.
A year after the railroads set their time zones, delegates from 25 countries met in Washington DC to ascertain time zones worldwide and throughout completely different countries. They set the usual starting level (the Prime Meridian) at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. With every 15 degrees longitude change, the time modified by one hour. Going east an hour was gained, and by traveling west an hour was decreased. The consequence was 24 time zones that covered your entire world.
The selection of Greenwich because the Prime Meridian was because of its well-likedity, though other nations were using other lengthyitude reference points. The observatory had a file of accurate and reliable navigation data used within the shipping industry, and Britain had more ships and shipping traffic than the rest of the world combined at that time. It wasn’t wholly adopted by each country proper away, however. The French used Paris as their Prime Meridian until 1911.
So who in the end decides what the time zones are? It’s really decided by particular person countries. While many nations adopted the hourly time zones, there were nonetheless many variations as completely different nations decided on half or quarter-hour deviations from those zones.
Many nations have changed their time zones to fit their needs. In 1949, China’s communist government moved the country’s five time zones into one. The time for your entire country was primarily based on the time in Beijing, and the reason was to ascertain nationwide unity. There are other oddities with time zones around the world. In the summer, Australia has not only vertical time zones like we’re familiar with but horizontal ones as well, and Russia really covers twelve time zones but only acknowledges 9 of them.
The current time zones are removed from uniform, and lots of other strange time zones crop up because of daylight saving time. This would require a wholly separate discussion.
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