By International Agreement One Meridian Was Selected to Be

The Greenwich line represents the world`s historical main meridian – longitude 0º. Every place on Earth has been measured in terms of distance east or west of that line. The line itself has divided the eastern and western hemispheres of the Earth – just as the equator divides the northern and southern hemispheres. If you stand with one foot on one side and the other on the left, you are perfectly in the middle of east and west, according to the line of the main meridian. The IDL was founded in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., according to the history of postcards. Chester A. Arthur convened the conference, which was attended by representatives from 26 nations. The president, like other world leaders, saw the need to set standards for an international agreement on time and duration. At the end of the 19th century. As global trade progressed, communication technologies became more sophisticated, and nations became more interdependent, it was imperative that all clocks be set to a global standard. Since the Greenwich meridian was defined according to the position of the Airy transit circle, the main meridian was now officially located there. The exact definition of zero degrees of longitude in the world therefore corresponded to the line of sight of the eyepiece of the Airy Transit Circle. On October 11, 1883, a convention of railroad managers met in Chicago and agreed to the introduction of five time zones in North America, based on Greenwich Mean Time.

[۸] [۹] Before the invitations to the Washington Conference on 1. The combined efforts of Abbe, Fleming and William Frederick Allen, Secretary of the General Time Convention of U.S. Railroads and editor of the Travellers` Official Guide to the Railways, had led the American railroads to an agreement that had led to the introduction of railway standard time throughout the country at noon on November 18, 1883. Thus, the Washington Conference was preceded by a strong sense of fait accompli, although the definition of local time was not part of the conference`s remit[10] and was not legally established until 1918. The International Meridian Conference was a conference held in October 1884 in Washington, D.C., United States, to determine a prime meridian for international use. [1] The conference was held at the request of US President Chester A. Arthur. The topic to be discussed was the choice of a “meridian used as a common length number zero and standard for calculating time worldwide”. [1] This resulted in the recommendation of the Greenwich meridian as an international standard for longitude of zero degrees.

[۱] The first suggestion for a coherent treatment of time worldwide was a dissertation entitled “Terrestrial Time” by Sandford Fleming, then chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was submitted to the Canadian Institute in 1876. This included watches that displayed 24-hour Universal Time with an additional dial, whose local time was rounded to the next time. [4] He also pointed out that many corrections for local mean time were greater than those involved in the abandonment of solar time. In 1878/79 he created modified propositions using the Greenwich meridian. Fleming`s two articles were considered so important that in June 1879 the British government sent copies to eighteen foreign countries and various scientific bodies in England. [5] At the same time, the American Metrological Society published a “Standard Time Report” by Cleveland Abbe, the head of the U.S. Meteorological Service, which proposed essentially the same scheme. If you go east of the main meridian, the time zones increase by an hour or vice versa if you go west. But the earth, of course, does not continue indefinitely; Finally, a point is reached where you have to start from scratch – or jump forward or backward in time, depending on the direction of the trip. The international date line is an imaginary line that crosses the Pacific Ocean in a north-south direction from the North Pole to the South Pole. The IDL extends south from the North Pole and follows the meridian 180 degrees until it deviates eastward to pass the Bering Strait, with Big Diomede Island, part of Russia, west of the IDL, and Little Diomede Island, part of the United States, remaining to the east.

Although the islands are only separated by the narrowest edges — only 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) — they experience different days, with Big Diomede Island still a day before Little Diomede Island. The IDL then jogs back west to tour the Aleutian Islands of the United States and keep Russia and Alaska on opposite sides. Since the Earth`s crust moves very easily all the time, the exact position of the main meridian now moves very easily, but the original reference for the world`s main meridian remains the Airy transit circle at the Royal Observatory, although the exact position of the line can move on either side of the Airy meridian. The International Meridian Conference has its origins in the Third International Geographical Congress in Venice in 1881, where the establishment of a universal prime meridian and a uniform time standard was at the top of the agenda. .