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by Anonymous on December 19th, 2004

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Why do we have time zones? How did they originate?

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  • by trashcity on December 21st, 2004

    trashcity

    Time zones are a way of standardizing time across a state, country or other region. Originally, time was kept purely on a local basis, but with inventions such as the railroad, it became necessary to agree on when "noon" was - the precise moment the sun reaches its highest point can differ, albeit only by a small amount, even for places close together. Going by the time in a given location simplifies matters greatly, at the fractional cost of astronomical inaccuracy (in most places, the sun no longer reaches its highest point exactly at 12:00).

    The first time zone in the world was established by British railroads in 1847, and by the end of 1852, time signals were being transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Greenwich Observatory. In America, multiple time zones were first proposed by teacher Charles F. Dowd around 1863. American and Canadian railroads implemented this on Sunday, November 18, 1883, when each railroad station clock was either advanced or delayed as noon, standard time, was reached within each time zone, east to west. The zones were named Intercolonial, Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific.

    Within one year, 85% of all large cities were using standard time. A notable exception was Detroit, which kept local time until 1900, then vacillated between Central Standard Time, Sun time, and Eastern Standard Time until it settled on EST in May 1915.

    Hourly time zones for the entire world were first proposed by Sir Sandford Fleming in 1876 and most major countries had adopted them by 1929. Even today, they have not been fully realized, with several zones keeping a standard time that is not offset by a number of whole hours from Greenwich Mean Time.

    Comments

    • The time zones aren`t very helpful to some places

      Yaseen_A

      by Yaseen_A on September 20th, 2010

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