Universal Time and Standard Time
Prior to the introduction of standard time, each municipality around the civilized world set its official clock, if it had one, according to the local position of the Sun (see solar time). This served adequately until the introduction of the steam engine, the telegraph, and rail travel, which made it possible to travel fast enough over long distances to require almost constant re-setting of timepieces as a train progressed in its daily run through several towns. Standard time, where all clocks in a large region are set to the same time, was established to solve this problem. Chronometers or telegraphy were used to synchronize these clocks.
Standard time, as originally proposed by Sir Sandford Fleming in 1879, divided the world into twenty-four time zones, each one covering 15 degrees of longitude. All clocks within each zone would be set to the same time as the others, but differed by one hour from those in the neighboring zones. The local time at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Greenwich, England was chosen as standard at the 1884 International Meridian Conference, leading to the widespread use of Greenwich Mean Time to set local clocks. This location was chosen because by 1884 two-thirds of all charts and maps already used it as their prime meridian. The conference did not adopt Fleming's time zones because they were outside the purpose for which it was called, which was to choose a prime meridian. In the period 1848 to 1972 all the major countries adopted time zones based on the Greenwich meridian.
In 1935 the term Universal Time was recommended by the International Astronomical Union as a more precise term than Greenwich Mean Time, because GMT could refer to either an astronomical day starting at noon or a civil day starting at midnight. However, the term Greenwich Mean Time persists in common usage to this day in reference to civil timekeeping.
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Famous quotes containing the words universal, time and/or standard:
“It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“You all talk like somebody else made these laws and Pharaoh don’t know nothing about ‘em. He makes ‘em his own self and he’s glad when we come tell him they hurt. why, that’s a whole lot of pleasure to him, to be making up laws all the time and to have a crowd like us around handy to pass all his mean ones on. Why, that’s a whole everything under the sun! Next thing you know he’ll be saying cats can’t have kittens.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)