How did the whole world end up agreeing on what time it is?
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People saying that the UK already had standardized time to coordinate rail travel are a bit…late.
The real origin of standardized time starts in 1714 with the Longitude act, with the british parliament offering a sizable reward to who ever could figure out a reliable method of determining a ships longitude. While there were a number of different schemes to do this (including observations of the moons of jupiter, lunar observations etc) the winning method ended up, much thanks to a clockmaker called John Harrison, being a very accurate timepiece, a chronometer. John Harrison started his work in the 1730s, and by 1761 he had developed the H4. A clock that was both immune to the motions of the sea and deviated less than a second per month.
By 1825 the entire british navy was equipped with chronometers and they were all synced at the Greenwich royal observatory. Whenever a royal navy ship was preparing to leave on a sea cruise they would anchor at the obervatory (located along the Thames) and at 1pm the observatory would drop a metal ball to signal the time (this method of time syncing would persist until the 1920s and the development of radio time syncing).
Once rail became a thing they would also adopt greenwich mean time, because it was already a thing, and the rest of the world followed because the british were the worlds largest empire at the time and they weren’t going to change their traditions for anyone, especially not royal navy traditions.
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