by Harry Lacey

Created on: March 02, 2009

The world's first time zone was established by British railway companies on December 1 1847. It was based on Greenwich Mean Time, the standardised time for the British Isles that was established, with the creation of the Royal Observatory, to help mariners work out longitude while at sea (Britain's power at the time was based on its presence at sea, so this became fundamental to its development as a trading superpower). Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was legally adopted as the measure of time across Britain in 1880. It is believed that the first country outside the British Isles to adopt the use of standardised time was New Zealand, in 1868 (probably because it was a British colony at the time).

Railroads would prove to be crucial in the establishment of standardised world time zones. In America, rail company owners found it nearly impossible to synchronise train times because each local station worked on different times, based on their own local noon. Charles F Dowd proposed dividing the country into four North-South zones in 1863, before William Allen suggested basing the demarcation of zones on the positions of the most important centres of rail commerce - the big cities. It was then that the zones we know today first came into being, and in 1918 the Standard Time Act was enshrined in American law.

Sandford Fleming is generally considered to be the first person to suggest a system of universal time zones, although his original idea was for a twenty-four clock to cover the globe. However, within fifty years or so, most countries had adopted time zones and done away with local deviations.

Today, a world without time zones seems unimaginable, but there are still places which do not strictly hold to the principles made into law by Britain and America. China, for example, still insists on the use of a single time zone across its enormous land mass, and countries like India and Australia use half-hour divisions; some small islands even use quarter-hour markers. Still, standardised time zones are the basis for international cooperation, communication and trade and have, since their creation, been remarkably successful, with no real changes having been made. The use of Greenwich as the world's datum time has never really been convincingly argued against, with only a few individuals suggesting possible alternatives - Rome being one. Britain being the centre of the world may be hard to swallow for some, but nobody can deny its scientific and maritime heritage - the very foundations of modern timekeeping.

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