Variations also occur because different countries or regions have adopted daylight saving time. Updated August 24, Karen Barss. A transcontinental train schedule was the mother of invention Map of world time zones? Engineering Time All that changed when railroads began to move people across great distances quickly. Setting the Standard In the United States, most states began adhering to the Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones by , but the use of time zones did not become mandatory until Congress passed the Standard Time Act of Time Zone Trivia While time zones are based on lines of longitude, some lines are drawn to avoid populated areas or to follow borders, and some countries have added their own variations because they don't want to be divided into several zones.
China is the largest country with only one time zone it should span five. India is the second largest country with only one. Russia adheres to its standard time zones except the entire country is on permanent daylight saving time and so is an hour ahead of their actual zones.
Australia uses three time zones; the eastern and western zones adhere to their assigned time, but the central zone is a half-hour ahead. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Matt Rosenberg. Geography Expert. Updated April 02, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Rosenberg, Matt. The History and Use of Time Zones. Understanding the Earth's Two North Poles. The Origins of the Term, 'Horsepower'. Biography of Sir Sandford Fleming Greenwich Mean Time vs.
He decided to make the seven-minute adjustment early one Sunday morning. The next day when people arrived at work, late according to clocks in businesses and factories, there was much cursing of timepieces and watch repair shops did a booming business. No one knew time had been manipulated. Osler kept his secret for many years.
The same problem with railways and time occurred across the Atlantic. North America had official time zones. Charles Dowd, an educator from Madison, Conn. Beginning in , he plagued railway officials with his idea, lecturing, writing for the press and scientific societies, and preparing extensive railroad timetables. He proposed his idea to Congress in but it was not adopted. Canada's Sir Sandford Fleming played a crucial role in developing a global system for setting time.
He apparently became an advocate of time zones after spending an uncomfortable night in a railway station because of time confusion. Fleming, who came to Canada from Scotland in , was Canada's foremost railway surveyor and construction engineer of the 19th-century. Fleming instigated the initial efforts that led to the adoption of the time zones used by the railways in and the global time zones we use today.
Fleming advocated dividing the world into 24 time zones, each equal to 15o of longitude and to one hour, beginning at the Greenwich Meridian 0o longitude. Railways, steamships, subways, telephones, and radio thundered into existence all at once, collapsing distance and compressing time in ways that dazzled and disoriented.
Technology also forced greater precision of calculation and measurement. Many Westerners felt that globalization required more accurate and predictable ways of measuring time. Timekeeping was a messy and bewildering business in most parts of the 19th-century world.
American railways recognized 75 different local times in ; three of those were in Chicago alone. In Germany, travellers had to clarify whether departures were according to Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Ludwigshafen, or Frankfurt time.
By the end of the century, this maddening variety of competing local times was making it difficult to transport everything from spices to armies. Clashing calendars made the headaches even worse. Until revolutionaries jettisoned the Julian calendar in , Russia was 13 days behind western Europe.
Islamic societies counted years from C. This was the dream articulated by Scottish-Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming and officially adopted by diplomats at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D. Calendar reform was no less critical. Simply extending the Gregorian calendar worldwide was one option. Many subscribed to a design first articulated by the French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte: a perfectly rationalized calendar year of 13 equal months with 28 days each.
Major firms like Sears and Kodak had been doing their internal accounting this way for years, but it proved a hard sell. Overall, time reformers were remarkably successful at bending the world to their will. But it was a hard-won achievement. Around the globe, local populations resented European meddling with their everyday lives and traditional rhythms.
0コメント