What I mean to ask is that how did people coordinate day to day activities without a universal date and time system? And how did the current date and time system get implemented universally?
In: 5
You coordinated day activities by the position of the sun in the sky. Sundials are very old, but even without them, you can tell where the sun is. People didn’t really travel far or fast enough to notice the difference when you travel east/west.
With the first actual clocks, the town would be responsible for measuring solar noon and adjusting the town’s central clock to hit noon at “mean solar noon,” the average time solar noon occurs each day (it does drift a little throughout the year). Anyone with their own clock could adjust theirs to match the town’s clock. This is also why bells chime on the hour, to tell everyone what time it is. Some places also fired a cannon at noon. This would mean neighboring towns could have different times by a few seconds, but it wasn’t really a big deal because, again, people didn’t travel fast or far enough for it to matter.
Once trains were invented, you could go between stations in towns that were minutes apart, so it was very hard to schedule arrival and departure times because you had dozens of stations with different times. This is when timezones were invented. In a timezone, there would be someone from the government to tell everyone when it is mean solar noon by telegraph. This allowed every town to synchronize their clocks to that, rather than the sun. This allowed the trains to schedule easier because they only had to account for time changes by crossing timezones, and the change is always an hour (or half hour in special cases).
Today, it’s all handled by the internet, but some of this old system still survives. If you listen to the radio, you may notice a tone at noon. That is the radio station telling you it’s noon, so you can set your clock to the correct time.
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