The Guardian, Friday 20 January 2012
The Old Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Photograph: Corbis |
Time zones
around the world are measured in relation to the north-south meridian that
divides the globe and runs through the Royal Observatory site in Greenwich,
south London.
Until the
late 19th century, towns kept their own time but the arrival of railways and
communications such as the telegraph meant international conventions were
needed. Greenwich was chosen as the centre of world time in an international
conference in Washington DC in 1884, partly because the US already based its
national system of time zones with Greenwich as its reference point.
Carriers of
most of the world's trade also used sea charts based on Greenwich's longitude,
the result of King Charles II's determination to establish a way British ships
could measure time and distance travelled at sea and find out exactly where
they were on the globe.
It was,
however, nearly 100 years before a Yorkshireman, John Harrison, won an £8,750
prize for resolving the problem of establishing at which longitude a ship might
be by comparing astronomical observations with the time on an accurate clock.
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