The time of year when we pay the greatest attention to the clock is approaching: New Year's Eve or New Year, which everyone celebrates at the same time but at various moments.
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| World time zone map |
I was in Saint Louis, Missouri a few years back on a business trip to the United States. From there, I went to Miami for my return flight to Argentina. Everything was going swimmingly until the pre-boarding hour arrived and there was no one. That's when I noticed that when I arrived in Miami, instead of moving the clock forward one hour, I moved it back, thus my time difference with the local time was two hours. I missed the flight, as predicted.
When discussing time and its unit of measurement, the hour, I constantly recall that particular tale. The great majority of us believe we can tell time with some accuracy, and we all have a reasonable notion of how time moves.
But we forget that time is an abstract term for which we just recently agreed on how to measure it uniformly. A similar misunderstanding, but with a train and 150 years ago, resulted in the development of a uniform standard to measure it.
The sun as a reference
For much of human history, each town or city had its own local time, based on the highest point of the Sun, which marked 12 noon. Small changes in local time, generally established by the church steeple clock, were unaffected by distances between locales or the pace at which people might move between locations (on foot, by boat, or on horseback). But that was changing with the coming of the train and the resulting increase in life's pace.
The time discrepancies between towns were already considerable, and issues developed, particularly with railway timetables. Around 1840, the railways were able to address this difficulty by developing their own standard time system known as "Railroad Time."
However, this method was not perfect because each railway company had its own time, which was normally decided by solar noon at company headquarters. If a passenger wished to use trains run by multiple railway companies, he needed to know what time each firm was operating. And the remedy was that the train stations featured multiple clocks, one for each firm, which caused considerable confusion for passengers.
Sandford Fleming, a Scottish-born Canadian engineer and prolific inventor, misses his train in 1876 owing to a scheduling error that causes it to depart in the afternoon rather than the morning. And it was that same night that Fleming, upset by the mishap, devised a 24-hour time system, dividing the planet into 24 time zones of 15 degrees each, determining the difference of one hour between them.
The International Meridian Conference was convened in Washington in 1884, with the goal of selecting a meridian to be used as a common zero longitude and time standard throughout the world. Several resolutions were adopted based on Fleming's proposal, including the selection of the Greenwich astronomical observatory's meridian as the single reference meridian and origin of the geographical longitude that would be used for cartography, but also to set the hours; universal day, also known as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time: Greenwich Mean Time), was adopted from Greenwich noon solar day.
This international standard time zone system was adopted on January 1, 1885, and different nations progressively adopted it.
Fleming's vision of a global time standard did not become a reality until January 1, 1925.
What is GMT,UT,UTC and Z
The GMT time has several problems from the start, because it is dependent on the location of the Sun and starts counting at noon.
The term "Universal Time" (UT) refers to a time standard based on the rotation of the Earth that was established by the International Astronomical Union in 1928 for scientific purposes. Consider GMT as a starting point, but with the day beginning at midnight. And it is established because astronomers realized that seeing the stars as they passed a meridian was more accurate than monitoring the Sun's location in the sky.
As our understanding of the Earth's rotation has grown, so has the number of variants of this system. Astronomical observatories have lost relevance in calculating exact time since 1950, thanks to the adoption of very accurate atomic clocks. As a result, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), based on International Atomic Time adjusted to leap seconds (those added to bring UTC close to mean solar time), became the basis for global civil time on January 1, 1972. This day has 86,400 seconds and is frequently referred to as Hour or Civil Time.
A common hour for the whole world
Some experts believe that the time zone or zone system has become outdated as a result of the Internet, because this form of communication and interaction across the entire world reduces distance and time boundaries between individuals, hence it is critical to unify the weather.
The plan aims to create a unique and global time, so that people in Buenos Aires, Paris, and Hong Kong all have the same time on their watches. This reduces the possibility of confusion while also boosting safety and efficiency in the utilization of time. There would just be various work and rest hours governed by local solar time.
We don't know if this idea will succeed, but we do know that, just as the train altered our way of life and interacting to one another 150 years ago, the Internet is now driving that shift.
The author Mauricio Saldivar is a meteorologist and scientific writer with a degree in environment and a doctorate in Geography. In Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Panama, Spain, the United States, and Italy, he completed specialties and postgraduate courses in Climate Change, Smart Cities, Resilient Cities, Sustainable Development, Early Warning Systems, and Basin Management.