How did the whole world end up agreeing on what time it is?
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The speed of the rotation of the Earth pretty much sets what time of day it is. When the sun comes up is the start of the day, when it is over head is the middle of the day, when the sun goes down is the end of the day. Easy. There is no “agreement” there, that’s simple how the world is.
Dividing the day up into artificial increments. Well different civilizations did that in different ways. Methods of doing this spread (in historical times) through conquest. Basically a military adept colonizing/conquering empire comes in and takes over and says, “We don’t care how you divide the day up, this is how we do it and this is how you’re going to do it from now on.”
So someone like the Roman Empire comes through and regardless of how you divided the day up before, you now divide the day up into 12 increments. And it’s easy enough to use a sundial to do this.
At some point, probably alongside the invention of clocks, we divide the day up into 24 equal increments (rather than only dividing the day up into 12 increments based on the length of daylight). Clocks can easily keep track of this and the position of the sun is still enough to roughly determine what time of day it is by the hour (calibrating it as Noon = Sun directly over head).
Breaking the day up into more specific increments really isn’t a thing until watches come along and still pretty much a luxury.
For a majority of human history there was no agreement because there was never a need to agree on the time. Each settlement simply set its own time (e.g. via a church or clock toward). The idea that you needed to know what the time was in some other place would have been looked at as silly.
But when things like trains and long distance travel and communication come along, there then does become a need to know what time it is somewhere else. So now there is a pressure, a need, to determine “what time it is” all around the world. So we come up with time zones. But we can’t force anyone to accept them, they’re just an idea people voluntarily agree to. Now, given that we are still in the age of empires, this “agreement” comes pretty readily because most of the population and landmass of the world is under the political control of a handful of entities. But that basically sets people’s time at least within the hour. If you are in a given time zone, that determines what your hour is.
And that basically covers things for the most part up to today. We have time zones that people agree to because it is a useful tool for international travel and communication.
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