Posted
on November 18, 2015
Arranging
a time system by the position of the sun makes a whole lot of sense.
The sun rises in the morning, is overhead at noon, and sets in the
evening. Whatever your time system is, you get used to those
morning-noon-evening times (for example, sunrises around 7:00 a.m.,
noon at 12:00 p.m., and sunsets around 7:00 p.m.).
But
of course, in the modern world we often talk to, listen to, or even
play games with people who live far away—even halfway around the
world! The further away from home, the more radically different the
position of the sun—and when you are talking about halfway around
the world, we are talking about day here being night there, and vice
versa.
Our
communications have gone pretty much instant and global. But our
transportation is pretty quick, in the modern world, as well. We
often drive and fly long distances—and we can then see firsthand
the local-time-by-sun being different in different places. If you
time it just right, you can take off in a plane at 7:00 a.m. and fly
a long distance and then land at 7:00 a.m. on the same day! One time
my family chased a sunset—it seemed to linger above the horizon for
a long time as we streaked westward.
When
the world was just starting the communication and transportation
revolution, in the second half of the 1800s, with the advent of
telegraphs and telephones and continent-straddling railroads, people
for the first time began to run into problems dealing with all the
different local times people were living by.
According
to Time and Date,
every city in the U.S. used a different time standard. Along the
route of the various railroad tracks, there were more than 300
different sun times to choose from as they announced their schedules
of arrivals and departures.
That
made the railroad schedule pretty tricky!
Railroad
managers established time zones, lumping together nearby sun times.
But what they set up were 100 railroad time zones! Still a bit of a
handful!
Finally,
on this date in 1883, railroad managers decided to make a much more
streamlined schedule: just four standard time zones for the
continental United States and Canada.
Britain
had already adopted a standard time system for all of England,
Scotland, and Wales, and people of both Britain and the U.S. urged
the rest of the world to adopt time zones. Perhaps surprisingly, it
only took a year to obtain an international standard time system.
Check
out this zoomable world time zones map.
Note that there are some “and-a-half” time zones, and there are a
lot of wavery-quavery bits in the lines between time zones.
There are also some time zones that have very little land mass in the
zones!
Also
on this date:
Pushkar
Camel Fair 11/18
to 11/25, 2015
Plan
ahead:
Check
out my Pinterest boards for:
And
here are my Pinterest boards for:
