American History

Sir Sandford Fleming FRSC KCMG (January 7, 1827 – July 22, 1915) was a Scottish Canadian engineer and inventor.

Inventor of worldwide standard time

Fleming is credited with "the initial effort that led to the adoption of the present time meridians".[12] After missing a train while travelling in Ireland in 1876 because a printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., he proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, conceptually located at the centre of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian. He later called this time "Cosmopolitan time" and later still "Cosmic Time".[13] In 1876 he wrote a memoir "Terrestrial Time" where he proposed 24 time zones, each an hour wide or 15 degrees of longitude. The zones were labelled A-Y, excluding J, and arbitrarily linked to the Greenwich meridian, which was designated G. All clocks within each zone would be set to the same time as the others, and between zones the alphabetic labels could be used as common notation. So for example cosmopolitan time G:45 would map to local time 14:45 in one zone and 15:45 in the next.[14][15]

In two papers "Time reckoning" and "Longitude and Time Reckoning" presented at a meeting of the Canadian Institute in Toronto on February 8, 1879, Fleming revised his system to link with the anti-meridian of Greenwich (the 180th meridian). He suggested that a prime meridian be chosen and analyzed shipping numbers to suggest Greenwich as the meridian.[16][17] Fleming's two papers were considered so important that in June 1879 the British Government forwarded copies to eighteen foreign countries and to various scientific bodies in England.[18]

Fleming went on to advocate his system at several major international conferences including the Geographical Congress at Venice in 1881, a meeting of the Geodetic Association at Rome in 1883, and the International Meridian Conference of 1884.[19] The International Meridian Conference accepted the Greenwich Meridian and a universal day of 24 hours beginning at Greenwich midnight. However, the conference's resolution specified that the universal day "shall not interfere with the use of local or standard time where desirable". The conference also refused to accept his zones, stating that they were a local issue outside its purview.[20]

Fleming authored the pamphlet "Time-Reckoning for the 20th Century",[21] published by the Smithsonian Institution in its annual report for 1886.[22]

By 1929, all major countries in the world had accepted time zones. In the present day, UTC offsets divide the world into zones, and military time zones assign letters to the 24 hourly zones, similarly to Fleming's system.[23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandford_Fleming