In contrast to the History of Time Series’ first four parts, this installment will only cover 200 years. We begin in the year 1676 with the first efforts to standardize global time.
Greenwich and Global Time
After some effective persuasion from John Flamsteed, King Charles II initiated construction of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, completing it in 1676, with Flamsteed acting as its first astronomer. Here, he would make several important contributions to astronomy, among them the first observations of Uranus. None would be more significant, though, than the conical projection, a formula for projecting a flat plane onto a sphere, and the Catalogus Britannicus, a catalog of over 3,000 stars.
The Nautical Almanac
Approximately 40 years after Flamsteed’s death, Nevil Maskelyne built upon his work and published the first Nautical Almanac in 1767. The almanac contained several tables with distances between the sun and moon. These distances would be used by navigators to determine their longitude and time relative to Greenwich. This exercise, called lunar distancing, was also the predominant method amongst surveyors, an increasingly important occupation during the colonial era.
The Improved Marine Chronometer
Also during 18th Century, while the European powers were busy carving out new territories, Thomas Earnshaw was busy improving the design of John Harrison’s marine chronometer to make it more affordable and durable. He was successful in both, and was awarded the equivalent of $325,000 in 1805 by the Board of Longitude.
With chronometers more accessible, navigators began carrying multiple devices and averaging out their readings to determine positioning and time. Chronometer accuracy would continue to improve, replacing lunar distancing as the primary timekeeping method by the mid-19th Century.
The Industrial Revolution – Accelerating Global Time
The 19th Century would bring the global Industrial Revolution. This era brought a litany of innovation not seen since the European Renaissance. Amongst the infinite developments, two emerged that fostered the global time standard.
Railroad time tables was the first, which wasn’t so much a technical innovation as an organizational one. Despite advancements in clockmaking and navigation, each town still possessed its own local time. Practically speaking, this meant before embarking on a trip, one would need to purchase a time table book (see below):
Clearly, trying to coordinate using these books was a nightmare, especially in the comparatively massive and growing United States. Herein lies the second global time innovation – the telegraph. The first telegraph system was developed by Claude Chappe in 1791 and by 1799 a network of towers operated across France. Samuel Morse would develop the first single-wire telegraph along with the standardized language, Morse Code, receiving the patent for the former in 1838.
The Prevalence of Railway Time
Across the pond, a handful of new British railroad networks began experimenting with running telegraph lines alongside their tracks. In 1852, the Royal Greenwich Observatory began initiating signals for “London Time” through the nation’s telegraph network. By 1855, all public institutions would set their central clocks to the ubiquitous “Railway Time” based on these signals. The first usable Transatlantic cable was laid between Ireland and Newfoundland in 1866, and with its laying came a new era of globalization.
The International Meridian Conference – Establishing Global Time
It took another twenty years, however, for a global time system to be established. The International Meridian Conference was held in 1884 in Washington D.C. and attended by delegates from 41 countries. During the conference, the 24 hour solar day was adopted universally, with the Greenwich Meridian serving as the prime, or zero-degree, meridian from where all longitude would be based. The primary reasons for the Greenwich Meridian (GMT) were its preemptive adoption by the United States for its national time zones and the ubiquity of British-developed nautical maps.
The next and final part of the series will take us to the present day and discuss the establishment of the UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time. We’ll also reestablish the logic behind dedicating the past five weeks to such an intense topic, and how it should be applied and contextualized within the journey of being more.
Be More.
Become Polymathic.
Quote of the Week: “Every industrial revolution brings along a learning revolution.” – Alexander De Croo