A time zone is a designated area of the globe that observes a uniform standard time. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries of countries and their subdivisions instead of strictly following longitude. France, including its overseas territories, has the most time zones of any country, with a total of 12. Most of the time zones on land are offset from Coordinated Universal Time by a whole number of hours to UTC+14: 00.
About Time zone in brief
A time zone is a designated area of the globe that observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries of countries and their subdivisions instead of strictly following longitude. France, including its overseas territories, has the most time zones of any country, with a total of 12. Most of the time zones on land are offset from Coordinated Universal Time by a whole number of hours to UTC+14: 00. Some higher latitude and temperate zone countries use daylight saving time for part of the year, typically by adjusting local clock time by an hour. Many land time zones are skewed toward the west of the corresponding nautical time zones. This also creates permanent daylight Saving Time effect. The first adoption of a standard time was in November 1840, in Great Britain by railway companies using GMT kept by portable chronometers. On November 2, 1868, the then British colony of New Zealand officially adopted a standard. time to be observed throughout the colony, and was the first country to do so. It was based on the longitude 172°30′ East of Greenwich, that is 11 hours 30 minutes ahead of GMT. This standard was known as New Zealand Mean Time. In 1870, Charles F. Dowd proposed a system of one-hour standard time zones for American railroads about 1863, although he published nothing on the matter at that time and did not consult railroad officials until 1869. By 1872, the first was centered on the meridian 75° of Greenwich.
Instead of a version proposed by Dowd, the U.S. railroads implemented a version of its time zone with geographic borders. The zones were named Intercolonial, Central, Central Mountain, and Pacific. Within 85% of all cities with 10,000 populations, each railroad station was reset as standard-time noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, also called \”The Day of Two Noons\”, when each railroad clock was reset to the standard time zone. Within a year, the Intercolonial time zone was reached within each major cities, with all cities within its border between its Eastern and Central time zones running through Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Charleston. In the mid-19th century, the railroad’s train schedules were published using its own time. Some junctions served by several railroads had a clock for each railroad, each showing a different time. The problem of differing local times could be solved across larger areas by synchronizing clocks worldwide, but in many places that adopted time would then differ markedly from the solar time to which people were accustomed. The use of time zones accumulates these differences into longer units, usually hours, so that nearby places can share a common standard for timekeeping. For example, Bristol, England is about 2. 5 degrees west of Greenwich, so when it is solar noon in Bristol, it is about 10 minutes pastSolar noon in London. The first of these companies to adopt standard time was the Great Western Railway in 1840.
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This page is based on the article Time zone published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 03, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
