It’s that time again when I have to adjust to ‘old time,’ the term Papa, my grandfather, used for standard time, and he called Daylight Savings Time ‘new time.’ It takes a while to get used to sunset at 4:50 p.m. and the sun shining brightly at 6:15 a.m. My body and brain don’t immediately adapt, but the most difficult change is when I travel across time zones.
Drive across the United States from Maine to California and you’ll go through four standard time zones. Travel to Alaska takes you to another one and Hawaii covers two more, except Hawaii and Arizona don’t observe Daylight Savings Time, but the Navajo Nation, in northeastern Arizona, does observe Daylight Saving Time.
This thinking about time sent me on a search to remember when and how time zones were established and to learn other exceptions. The need for a standard time became necessary with the beginning of railroad travel. Prior to 1883 there were over 300 local times across the United States.
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was adopted universally in 1884. The world is divided into zones by longitude, with each hour 15 degrees apart. The starting point is the Prime Meridian, 0° longitude, that runs from the North Pole to the South Pole and passes through the Old Royal Observatory, in Greenwich, England, near London. Here in middle Tennessee we are in the GMT-6 (hours) Standard Time Zone so when it’s 4:00 p.m. in Greenwich, it’s 10:00 a.m., six hours earlier here. Counting around the world an hour difference for each fifteen degrees would mean there are twenty-four time zones.
Except, it doesn’t exactly work that way because some time zones are determined by political and geographical boundaries and some by choice. So, there are forty time zones and all aren’t based on an hour. India, Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Newfoundland, Venezuela, and parts of Australia use half-hour differences from standard time. I would be really confused traveling in Australia because there are three time zones: GMT+8, GMT+9½, and GMT+10. When it’s 4:00 p.m. on the west coast, it’s 5:30 p.m. in central Australia, and 6:00 p.m. on the east coast.
Time in some places is even more unusual. Nepal, a small country in the Himalayas and bordered by China and India, adopted GMT+5¾ in 1956, and the Chatham Islands in New Zealand is GMT+12¾ so those are 45 minutes past the hour. China is also unique; geographically it covers five time zones, but in 1949 the country established one time zone, Beijing time which is GMT+8.
I imagine that the scientists from around the world who created Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 thought they’d set the world straight. But the lines for worldwide time zones are more crooked than the Caney Fork River.
Everybody just doesn’t go along with a plan. Like Papa who never changed his clock that hung above the kitchen table to ‘new time’ because dinner was always eaten at 12:00 noon on ‘old time.’
Filed under: Everyday Life | Tagged: Daylight Savings Time, standard time, time, time zones | Leave a comment »
Susan Writes 