In November 1840, the Great Western Railway of Britain adopted this fictitious measure, known locally as Greenwich Mean Time. Other railways soon followed suit. Standard time didn’t become the law of the land until 1880, however, when the Definition of Time Act took effect in the UK and received the Royal Assent.
Britain proposed that the rest of the world follow its lead, and suggested that midday in London would be noontime everywhere else—even in places where noon might fall at midnight. As Rovelli puts it, “people are attached to local time,” so this idea didn’t fly.
But compromises had to be made, or chaos would reign. Lack of standardization was bad for businesses like the shipping industry. So, in 1884, chronologists from around the world met for the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC, where Britain convinced other countries to adopt Greenwich Mean Time as the prime meridian for measuring longitude and timekeeping.
The reasoning for this was that the Brits had more ships than all other nations put together and had highly developed nautical maps, as well as advanced chronological data. GMT thus became the standard, and the globe was divided into three corresponding time zones. “In this way, the discrepancy between 12 on the clock and local midday is limited to 30 minutes,” the physicist explains.
Ephrat Livni em entrevista a Carlo Rovelli. Sobre a história do GMT, ver também aqui, aqui, aqui, aqui ou ainda aqui.
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