Why Do We Have Time Zones?

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Mr. Beat explains time zones. He goes through the history of time zones and explains why we have them in the first place. Don't forget to check out @ScienceAsylum's video here

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#timezones #geography #socialstudies

A time zone is a region of the Earth where everyone agrees it’s the same time. Also referred to as “local time,” most time zones are exactly one hour apart.

People travel through time all the time thanks to time zones. Yep, just by going west you can go BACK IN TIME. But go too far west and you’re in the future. But don’t worry. Just travel back east and you’ll get back to the past. Oh boy I am already losing many of you.

Now, we’ve been dividing each day into 24 hours going back to, like, the ancient Egyptians. And because most of us still measure how long a day is by hours, the idea is that there would be 24 time zones around the earth, ya know...since the Earth rotates about 15 degrees every hour. After 24 hours, that’s a full rotation of 360 degrees for a full day. So you’d have 24 lunes, or shapes that look like this, all 15 degrees of longitude apart and boom, we all live happily ever after.

But no, that’s not how time zones are shaped. And in fact, there are more than 24 time zones! In fact, as many as 39 time zones?

Now originally there WERE 24 standard time zones that extended from the South Pole to the North Pole, but due to mainly politics and geography, time zones are often very skewed.

First, it’s important to remember that before the invention of the railroad, time zones weren’t really needed. If you traveled before railroads were invented, you traveled by...uh...walking. If you were lucky, you might get to travel by horse, or if you were even luckier you might get to travel by ship. But by the time railroads were more common in the 1830s and into the 1840s, this made travel time way faster and really screwed up communication about what time it was.

But the British had been thinking about this problem long before the railroads came. As they established an empire around the world beginning in the 1600s, some back in London realized they needed to standardize a way of measuring time to help mariners when they were determining longitude when out at sea. So they’d reference wherever they were back to London. It wasn’t until 1721, however, that Great Britain officially created its own prime meridian, or Earth’s zero degrees longitude, passing through their newly established Royal Observatory in Greenwich, a borough in London. Other countries established their own prime meridian, of course, usually passing through THEIR capital cities and yeah they called it different things.

Flash forward to the 1840s, and now we had railroads to worry about. At every railway stop, the local time would be different. That led to railroad companies establishing the first time zones that matched their imaginary prime meridians that ran through their capital cities.