Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. 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. Coordinated Universal Time. Prior to that, time of day was a local matter, and most cities and towns used some form of local solar time, maintained by a well-known clock on a church steeple, for example, or in a jeweler's window. The new standard time system was not immediately embraced by all, however. The train at right is a Union locomotive used during the American Civil War, photo ca.
The first man in the United States to sense the growing need for time standardization was an amateur astronomer, William Lambert, who as early as presented to Congress a recommendation for the establishment of time meridians. Dowd revised his proposal in , and it was adopted virtually unchanged by U. Detroit kept local time until , when the City Council decreed that clocks should be put back 28 minutes to Central Standard Time.
Half the city obeyed, while half refused. After considerable debate, the decision was rescinded and the city reverted to sun time. A derisive offer to erect a sundial in front of the city hall was referred to the Committee on Sewers. Then, in , Central Standard Time was adopted by city vote.
It remained for a Canadian civil and railway engineer, Sandford Fleming, to instigate the initial effort that led to the adoption of the present time meridians in both Canada and the U. Time zones were first used by the railroads in to standardize their schedules. Sandford Fleming wears the stovepipe hat and is to the left of the man with the hammer also played a key role in the development of a worldwide system of keeping time. Trains had made the old system - where major cities and regions set clocks according to local astronomical conditions - obsolete.
Time zones were, therefore, a compromise, relaxing the complex geographic dependence while still allowing local time to be approximate with mean solar time. American railroads maintained many different time zones during the late s. Each train station set its own clock making it difficult to coordinate train schedules and confusing passengers.
Time calculation became a serious problem for people traveling by train sometimes hundreds of miles in a day , according to the Library of Congress. Every city in the United States used a different time standard, so there were more than local sun-times to choose from.
Railroad managers tried to address the problem by establishing railroad time zones, but this was only a partial solution to the problem. Operators of the new railroad lines needed a new time plan that would offer a uniform train schedule for departures and arrivals. Four standard time zones for the continental United States were introduced on November 18, Britain, which already adopted its own standard time system for England, Scotland, and Wales, helped gather international consensus for global time zones in Various meridians were used for longitudinal references among different countries before the late s, and the Greenwich Meridian was the most popular of these.
Moreover, the shipping industry would benefit from having just one prime meridian. Many people informally recognized the Greenwich Meridian as the prime meridian before the International Meridian Conference in Sir Sandford Fleming was one of the key players in developing a satisfactory worldwide system of keeping time.
0コメント