HISTORY:
TIC-TOCK, TIC-TOCK: THE COMING OF TIME ZONES:
This coming Sunday we are due to go to 'Daylight Savings Time'. In accord with the maxim "spring ahead- fall back" clocks will be set one hour ahead. The history of the institution of Daylight Savings Time is interesting in itself and will be the subject of a future item on this blog. But before there was DST there were "time zones". These are a much more recent invention than most people imagine and have a fundamental "Canadian connection". So let's deal with them first.

A "time zone" is an area of the Earth (defined by longitude) that has the same time throughout. The globe is traditionally divided into 24 time zones, and though actual "solar time" is obviously different at different locations in such zones (they are 15 degrees in length, so sunrise at the far eastern end of one would be about 1 hour earlier than at the western end) the conventional time is held to be a given hour on the clock within the time zone. The "mean time" within the zone is taken as the actual time for time keeping purposes. Before the era of rapid transportation and communication this hardly mattered. Time was what it actually seemed to be by the motion of the sun. Convenient then but not later.

Earlier time zones were based on Greenwich mean Time (GMT) (see later) which set the location of longitude 0 degrees(also known as the "prime meridian") at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich England. This was "fine" except that the actual rotation rate of the Earth varies, actually slowing down. In the beginning the rate of time measured by atomic clocks was redefined regularly to accord with solar time. In 1972, however, the situation was reversed, and "leap seconds" were introduced to keep GMT in line with a primary standard of atomic time. This new definition of time is known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, often abbreviated in English speaking counties to UT). Most countries in the world accept the new definition, though there is still debate about its basis. One can easily find one's own time in accordance with GMT or UT by consulting the Time and Date website, a reference that Molly has often mentioned in her posts about astronomical matters.

Greenwich Mean Time was first established in 1675 when the Royal Observatory was built at Greenwich. Its original purpose was as a standard to aid mariners in establishing longitude during sea voyages. The first "time zone" was set up by British Railways on December 1, 1847 as a standard time carried by watches on the railways. This was known as "Railway Time". By about August 23, 1852 time signals were transmitted by telegraph from Greenwich (a great,great,great grandfather of Molly's beloved NRC time signal). By 1855 98% of England's clocks were using GMT., but it was 1880 until it was made the official time. Ireland was excluded. In 1868 New Zealand adopted an official time as well, known as New Zealand Mean Time. This was first other country in the world to adopt an official time, but it was not yet the usual time zone that we know, being "out of sync" by 30 minutes- something like our Canadian institution of "30 minutes later in Newfoundland".

In the USA the adoption of a standard time was inhibited by competition amongst the various railway companies who would often set their standard time based on the location of either their headquarters or of their important centres. The result was a confusion of times that was only rectified by the US Congress on march 19, 1918 with the adoption of the 'Standard Time Act".

Long before this the concept of standard time zones was proposed by the Canadian engineer Sir Sandford Fleming. He was quite a prolific fellow, being involved with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway as well as the issue of Canada's first postal stamp. Busy, busy,busy. He first put forward his proposal in 1876, and in 1879 he proposed a 24 hour clock with a day that would begin at the "anti-meridian" (180 degrees from Greenwich). In October 1884 the International Meridian Conference adopted a 24 hour day, but did not adopt his time zones. Through the course of the next century most nations gradually came into compliance with the original proposal of 1 hour time zones. There are still some hold-outs. Newfoundland is the only Canadian exception, but other nations such as India, Iran, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Burma, the Marquesas Islands and parts of Australia are still out of sync by an half hour. Nepal and the Chatham Islands have quarter hour deviations.

There is also a concept known as "Nautical Time" which is used by ships at sea. This is an exact agreement to the 24 hour time zones as per the International Date Line(IDL) and the Greenwich Meridian. While in the territorial waters of a country whose time differs from this the ship keeps local time, but it reverts to this universal standard upon leaving said waters. Many countries have a standard time that differs considerably from what one would expect from their location vis-a-vis Greenwich or the IDL. France and Spain, for instance use the central European time zone even though most of France is close to the longitude of Greenwich and almost all of Spain is to the west of it. France used to use GMT, but this was changed during the German occupation in WW2, and it was never changed back. Better to be on Berlin time than London time I guess.

Daylight Savings Time, where the clocks are changed twice a year, was first proposed in 1907, but it only became popular in many countries during WW1. In recent years the days of the change have been changed in some places as an "energy conservation measure". This "probably" works, though the jury is still out on the matter. See a future post on this blog on Daylight Savings Time. Russia is the world's leader on time zones, with 11 from Kaliningrad to the edge of Kamchatka. China has officially only one time zone which makes things rather bizarre as a rational (as opposed to Communist) way of ordering time would split that country up into 5 zones. It is as if 8:00 am in Halifax were also 8:00 in Calgary. That may seem OK until you realize that this actually means 3:00 in our present system. Don't forget to be at work at 4:00 am boys and girls ! Most computer systems use UTC as a baseline, though there are difficulties amongst the systems because of the complications of local time zones who have not adopted a standard 24 clock.

Yet, most of the world, with a few exceptions, has adopted a 24 clock based time zone convention without any centralized directing authority to enforce same. Like the international postal system cited well over a century ago by Kropotkin as an example of how anarchist methods of organization by negotiation rather than direction, this is an example of how superfluous government often is. Such negotiations and compliance with custom could have as easily been carried out or "not" carried out (and often were, as the example of Manitoba and Saskatchewan demonstrates) by local communities as by nation states.

Some time ago there was a column in Scientific American called 'Connections' wherein the author of the column would go through a long list of historical connections, beginning with one figure and gradually spiralling back to the original person. Here's an interesting effort in this genre. Sanford Fleming had a son who took up the theatre as a career. This son was later associated with Doris Mavor Moore, one of the pre-eminent figures in Canadian drama. Doris was the daughter of James Mavor, the famous (in the limited Canadian sense) Canadian scholar and great friend of Peter Kropotkin (he sponsored Kropotkin's Canadian tour). Mavor was familiar with Fleming, and the circle is completed. Admittedly far less ornate that the SA articles were.