When were world time zones invented, by whom and what method(s) were used to create them?

Standard time happened in England, promoted by Abraham Osler and implemented first in the 1840s by the railroads, to keep their train schedules organized. But Britain had only one time zone and every town was on the same time.

To quote http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=ArchivedFeatures&Params=A231

Canada’s Sir Sandford Fleming played a crucial role in developing a global system for setting time. He apparently became an advocate of time zones after spending an uncomfortable night in a railway station because of time confusion. Fleming, who came to Canada from Scotland in 1845, was Canada’s foremost railway surveyor and construction engineer of the 19th-century.

Fleming instigated the initial efforts that led to the adoption of the time zones used by the railways in 1883 and the global time zones we use today. Fleming advocated dividing the world into 24 time zones, each equal to 15o of longitude and to one hour, beginning at the Greenwich Meridian (0o longitude). He was instrumental in convening the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884. Representatives of 25 nations from Europe, North and South America and Asia attended; all adopted Fleming’s system of international standard time. Fleming did not invent standardized time, but he is the father of international standard time.

The Royal Observatory, in Greenwich, England, was established in 1675 by Charles II to figure out a way for ships at sea to keep track of time. Two hundred years later, in 1884, "Greenwich Mean Time" (or Universal Time) was established as the world standard for origin of location and time measuring throughout the world.

Timezones are a matter of government policy throughout the world. In general, everybody expects the sun to rise several hours after midnight, and for it to set several hours before midnight.

Most time zones tend to be 1 hour wide. For example, San Francisco is eight hours behind GMT, Denver, is seven hours behind GMT and so on. Timezones east of Greenwich are said to be "ahead", for example Paris, and most of western Europe is 1 hour ahead of Greenwich.

A notable exception to the one hour rule is India, with the same timezone throughout the country, it is 6.5 hours ahead of Greenwich. There are other cases, Afghanistan and Newfoundland (in Canada), and Australia's Central Timezone are all off from their neighbors by 1/2 an hour.

Complicating matters is Daylight Savings Time. People like to get up and start working soon after sun up -- so in many countries "daylight savings time" is established in order to take advantage of the more daylight hours with sunlight during the summer. In spring, the clock is moved back an hour to account for this, and in fall it is moved ahead an hour.

The International Date Line is on the other side of the planet from Greenwich, mostly running through the Pacific Ocean, each time the sun passes over that, we count another day on the universal time calendar. So when it is dinner time in San Francisco, it's "tomorrow morning" already in New Zealand.

more info: http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/