How did the whole world end up agreeing on what time it is?
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It was actually a long process, and started in the mid 1800s in the UK in an effort to synchronize train schedules. The widening use of the telegraph helped because before that, communication over long distances was done at the speed of horse (or train) and synchronizing time from city to city was not important. By 1880, Britain made the use of this synchronized train time official for the country. In 1883, the General Time Convention was widely adopted throughout the US and Canada, primarily because a common time was necessary for the nascent railroad industry – hard to make the trains run on time if you can’t agree on the time. This convention mirrored the earlier British convention and established time zones as well (using GMT as the prime meridian/reference for all time zones). Once these major countries agreed on a time convention (the adoption of the Greenwich Mean Time as the reference, and time zones utilizing GMT as their benchmark), one by one nearly all of the world’s nations adopted the same time convention.
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