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
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.
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