Time zones

Are you sure your trip plans will not be spoiled by time confusion while traveling around the world? You won’t miss a bus or a train if you are aware of time zones. Get to know some curious details about the history of this notion.

Do you know that when it’s 6 P.M. in Paris, it’s 1P.M. in New York? This difference in time is explained by time zones, which were set for convenience of all people. The necessity of division the world into such zones arose from confusion in timetables during transcontinental trips across America. The problem was that before 1860 the majority of cities lived according to their own solar time that changed by 1 minute every 12 miles on the way from East to West. There were about 300 of local times at that moment. Trying to solve the problem Sanford Flemming, an engineer, offered to divide the globe into 24 time zones. Each zonelies between 2 meridians and equals to 1 hour.

The most important meridian is referred to as the Greenwich or prime meridian and is situated in outskirts of London. It runs though the main telescope at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The Greenwich meridian is the starting point for all other time zones. Thus, in time zone to the right, to the east of the prime meridian it’s one hour more, and vice versa, in time zone to the left, to the west of the prime meridian it’s one hour fewer, and so on going in both directions time is added or taken away up to 12 hours.

This system of chronology was adopted as national in Great Britain in 1880. Over all the territory of the country Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was accepted which later was called as Universal Time (UT). Now this abbreviation – GMT – is widely used all over the world for time determining. Local time is easily calculated basing on GMT: a definite number of hours is added or taken away from this starting point. Surely, nowadays you can know the exact time in any place surfing the Internet.

Greenwich Mean Time and division into time zones were universally approved at the International Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884. Every fifteenth meridian to the east and to the west, starting from the Greenwich meridian, was considered the center of its time zone. Though very often because of political and administrative reasons, time zones are limited not by meridians but by country borders.

There’re some more curious facts about time zones:

• Time of arrival and departure time are always set according to local time;
• The world celebrates New Year’ Eve 24 times;
• You can live a day twice: just move to another time zone;
• When people at one place go to bed, others wake up in the opposite place of the globe.