How were timezones fixed by countries? Why did some countries get 3 timezones and some get only 1 despite being the same size? How did we get all the countries to measure time globally using the same measurement?
In: Earth Science
TLDR: A lot of the standards we used became standards because of European Imperialism. Timezones are a international guidelines, Countries can set them up however they want.
The 24 hour day has been in use since at least the Egyptians, but accurately measuring time was standardized by the Europeans because they were the first to make accurate and reliable clocks.
The British came up with the idea of timezones, defining the time at Greenwich England as ‘0’, because they realized that time wasn’t standardized across the empire. The Sun rises and falls at different times across the globe.
Having small accurate clocks was a critical development for navigation because a ships clock is used to determine your longitude. So it was natural that trade ships would show off their accurate clocks to other nations.
Like the Metric system, and the Imperial system of measure before it, a lot of nations adopted the European method of time keeping as a standard because it made it easier for international trade, that and good old fashioned colonization and imperialism.
Nations decide their own timezones. By international agreement the timezones are roughly defined based on longitude, but a country can decide which timezone it falls in to. Generally speaking you want to follow the international standard because in your timezone noon will be when the sun is overhead.
A country could decide it has just 1 timezone to make things easier for it’s people, or if it’s quite wide it will likely have more than 1.
Countries will typically assign their timezones base on their borders, for example crossing from one Province into another, because it’s convenient.
But there are some weird one-off cases. Newfoundland in Canada for example has a timezone that’s 1/2 an hour different from the main land. They are far enough off shore that having a half timezone makes sense, but it’s also believed it was done out of protest because the Newfies loved to be different from Canada back in the day.
Time zones are an infrastructural tool. You use them to meet some kind of infrastructural purpose (such as everyone knowing when everyone else’s business hours are). Most countries do this by splitting themselves into blocks and giving each block its own time zone and expecting people to convert between them as necessary. Others thought a better idea would just be to put everyone on the same time zone and have some people’s work hours start well before normal and some start well after.
As for getting the entire world to measure time the same way: Good old fashioned imperialism. Everyone has the same length of day and the same length of year, but comes up with their own way of subdividing this. Europeans were using the current system when they decided they were going to conquer the world, and to make things easier to deal with, they went “hey people we’re taking over, you should use our clocks and calendars!” and eventually those who didn’t want to ended up doing so anyway just because it became more convenient given the rest of the world was already doing it at this point.
Time zones (if you wanted them to make sense) would go in straight lines north to south splitting the world into segments like an orange. Doing this means some places have one time for their whole country except for a small portion and that would just get confusing, so they told the rest of the world that their whole country would use the one time zone. Have that sort of thing happen a bunch (and some places just wanna be the same time zone as a trade partner) and you get the squiggly lines we have now.
Countries decide their own time zones – if one country wants to make up 12 time zones and another country of the same size wants to just use 1, they have that right.
And then sometimes territories within a country have the autonomy to decide their own time zones, too. Like in the US, states can decide if they want to observe daylight saving time or not, which impacts which time zone they fall in when other states in the same general longitude range switch over.
In 1878, Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming proposed the system of worldwide time zones that we use today. He recommended that the world be divided into twenty-four time zones, each spaced 15 degrees of longitude apart.
United States railroad companies began utilizing Fleming’s standard time zones on November 18, 1883. In 1884 an International Prime Meridian Conference was held in Washington D.C. to standardize time and select the prime meridian. The conference selected the longitude of Greenwich, England as zero degrees longitude and established the 24 time zones based on the prime meridian. Although the time zones had been established, not all countries switched immediately. Though most U.S. states began to adhere to the Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern time zones by 1895, Congress didn’t make the use of these time zones mandatory until the Standard Time Act of 1918.
> How were timezones fixed by countries
The countries decided for themselves. Timezones aren’t some internationally regulated thing: Every country can literally declare what timezone they are on (or fractions thereof) at any time.
> Why did some countries get 3 timezones but some 1
Because some countries decided to use three to follow the geography of the country, but some decided 1 was plenty to have the entire country follow the same timezone regardless of location.
> How did we get all the countries to use the same time measurement
Trains and business. In a rapidly interconnected world where communications were getting faster and faster synchronizing clocks between interacting countries (or between communities within countries) became a smarter and smarter decision.
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