Life's great Mysteries - Why is Greenwich the official timekeeper for the whole world?

Seriously, who made this town in England the boss of time? And why? Let’s start with some history. Throughout most of human history, the best way humans could keep track of time was to look up at the sun and make an estimate based on its position. Eventually, clocks were invented, dramatically improving punctuality. By the 1800s, clocks and pocket watches were accurate to within less than a second. The problem was, people in different places set their clocks differently, usually based on when the sun would set or rise. The result? Times were different in different places, and when people traveled, they would have to reset their watches whenever they arrived at a destination, to match the local time.

This got to be a serious problem in the 1800s when railroads became a popular way to travel. Imagine trying to run a complex schedule of arrival and departure times when each location had clocks that were slightly out of synch with other locations. A lot of people missed their trains because their own clocks were different from the railways’ clocks.

In the 1850s, countries in Europe decided to establish a standard time, such as London time for all of England, and Rouen time for France. However, the USA was so large that, on November 18, 1883, the US adopted four time zones, which were meticulously established by a group of railroad operators. Each time zone had a standard time that everyone could set their clocks to.

Well, that’s fine and dandy, but it did not meet the need for a standard global time. So, in 1884, the US held the International Meridian Conference in Washington D.C. Experts from dozens of countries attended, and the group selected the global prime meridian (a prime meridian is an arbitrarily chosen line of longitude defined as zero degrees) as the starting point to measure all time zones. This line of longitude passes through Greenwich, England, so it’s also called the Greenwich Meridian.

Why choose the Greenwich Meridian to start all time zones? Because, for centuries, Greenwich was home of the Royal Observatory. The clock there was already being used to set the official London time. At that time, the British Empire had a huge impact on international shipping, and the British had created countless sea charts and schedules based on Greenwich Mean Time that were already used by mariners from many countries. So, it seemed a natural choice for the entire world to set all clocks based on Greenwich Mean Time.

Then, of course, people had to go and mess everything up with pesky daylight savings time nonsense.