Since the ancient Egyptians created the 24-hour clock, knowing the time has been crucial for everyone from ships' captains to train drivers. North Korea's Kim Jong-un is the latest, but not the first, leader to use it as a political tool.
The Korean Peninsula commemorated the 70th anniversary of its liberation from Japan on Saturday. To mark the occasion, North Korea launched its very own time zone, turning the clocks back by half an hour.
The country’s state news agency said the move returned the country’s time zone to coordinated universal time (UTC) +8.30, which it was before Japan colonised the peninsula in 1910, and argued that the old time – still used by Japan and South Korea – meant the Sun was not directly overhead at noon.
In its inimitable style, Pyongyang said: “The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land with 5,000 year-long history and culture and pursuing the unheard-of policy of obliterating the Korean nation.”
While the creation of “Pyongyang time” has been criticised by South Korea as a “regression” in attempts to bring the two nations closer to reconciliation, North Korea is not the first country to create its own time zone; Hugo Chavez turned Venezuela’s clocks back by half an hour in 2007, to ensure “more fair distribution of the sunrise”.
Samoa went so far as to lose a day when, in 2011, it moved to the other side of the International Date Line, to improve communications with Australasia and South-east Asia.
Historically, time zones have provided much needed standardisation and efficiency, but their use can also be political, and confusing. China and India both use single time zones, despite the fact that they are huge territories.
Consequently, the far west of China is two-and-a-half hours ahead of India’s time zone, even though it is farther west than much of India. Crossing over Afghanistan’s Wakhjir Pass at China’s most westerly border involves putting your watch forward three-and-a-half hours.
However, while mankind has always measured time and used it to regulate daily life, the idea of time zones is a much more recent construct.
At times they can be downright controversial – rooted not just in geography, but a history of empire, revolution and enterprise.
From the very beginnings of civilisation, the movements of the Sun, Moon, stars and planets played a crucial role in religious and civil structures, with Egyptian and Minoan buildings incorporating astronomical orientation.
The Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days, written circa 700BC, uses the movements of stars and constellations to explain the best seasons to farm and sail.
We have the ancient Egyptians to thank for the first 24-hour clock, split between 10 “hours” of daylight, 12 “hours” of night, and single twilight “hours” at the start and end of daytime. However, the length of these hours were not equal, and changed seasonally.
Just over 2,000 years ago, the Greek astronomer and mathematician Hipparchus suggested dividing the day into 24 equal hours.
It took several hundred years and the invention of mechanical clocks in Europe about 700 years ago, for this to properly catch on, even if clocks remained a luxury for most of the next 400 years.
And those clocks were set to local solar time, with communities and regions setting clocks based around their own sunsets and sunrises – the Sun would be due east at 6am, south at 12 noon and west at 6pm.
None of this mattered very much when it still took a week-and-a-half to travel from London to Edinburgh and a month to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The differences in time zones were virtually unnoticeable.
However, as the western world propelled itself into the industrial revolution, things began to change.
Telling the correct time at sea was particularly important, so that ships could use both longitude and latitude to fix their exact position.
Britain’s John Flamsteed was appointed King Charles II’s first Astronomer Royal in 1675, and the Royal Observatory was built in Greenwich to “find the so-much desired longitude of places”, when land was not in sight. This would later mark the point where Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was calculated.
Pressure mounted to improve navigation at sea when, in 1707, 1,400 British sailors drowned because their fleet miscalculated its position and hit rocks.
In 1714, Parliament set up a panel of experts called the Board of Longitude and offered £20,000 – £2 million today – to anyone who could discover how to find longitude at sea.
After 60 years of head-scratching, the prize was claimed in 1764 by John Harrison, a clockmaker form Yorkshire. The next year, a new act came into place, setting up a widespread use of chronometers among merchant mariners.
The clocks also had their use on land. To counteract local time discrepancies, guards on horse-drawn coaches would carry timepieces, which they used to regulate arrival and departure times – gaining 15 minutes for every 24 hours travel eastward, and vice versa.
The steam train was invented in 1804, and it was not long before rail networks sprang up across Europe. The 250-kilometre Great Western Railway from London to Bridgewater was completed in 1841 and had a timetable listing the time differences between stops.
The final piece of the puzzle was the creation of the first commercial electric telegraph in 1839. Now the railway companies could tell all their stations simultaneously to set their clocks to the same time.
The Great Western Railway set a precedent by standardising all its timetables to London time, followed by North Western Railway in 1846.
The next year, Railway Clearing House suggested all railway companies start using GMT.
Britain now had its own time zone and the rest of the world would soon follow.
In 1851, the Royal Observatory’s Airy Transit Circle telescope made its first observation, declaring Greenwich as the Prime Meridian – or Longitude 0° – the east-west centrepoint of the world.
By the end of the next year, telegraphs sent by Greenwich Observatory were being communicated across the country, and in 1880, GMT received Royal Assent – officially becoming Britain’s standard time.
Britain’s East India Company established the Old Madras Observatory in 1792. Its first official astronomer, John Goldingham, set the longitude of Madras as 80º 18’ 30”.
The observatory’s clock then set the country’s standard time. Every day, a gun connected to the observatory would be fired at 8pm to declare all was well with Indian Standard Time.
In the United States, the new Pacific Railroad from Missouri to San Francisco crossed more than 8,000 towns, each using local time.
A school principal, Charles F Dowd, was the first to offer a practical plan for standardising US time in the late 1860s, and continued to work on his plans through the 1870s. However, after railway superintendents pushed him to move the meridian from Washington to New York, he suggested it be based on GMT.
Even after railway managers reduced the 300 time zones to 100, these varied by more than three hours. The problem came to a head in 1853, when two trains collided due to improper timekeeping, killing 14 people.
After this, railway time was introduced, though this only cut the time zones by half and train attendants still had to constantly change their watches.
The US Naval Observatory started telegraphing time signals to Washington DC in 1865 – which were then sent via Western Union to the railway companies.
In 1883, a proposal to standardise railway time, based on Dowd’s four time zones, was adopted by numerous companies and local governments.
Finally, the next year, the International Meridian Conference was held in Washington at the request of US president Chester A Arthur, with 41 delegates from 25 nations in attendance. Their vote determined that Greenwich would represent the Universal Day.
As there are 24 hours in a day, and 360 degrees in a circle, time zones would be 15 degrees in width – which would take one hour for the Sun to pass.
However, while parallels of latitude are based on the Earth’s rotational axis, the Prime Meridian was not.
It was more a matter of influence. Although the bid won 22 votes to one, France and Brazil abstained, hoping for a more “neutral” alternative. Unfortunately for them, more than two-thirds of global shipping already used charts based on Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.
In 1912, China’s Qing dynasty fell, replaced by Sun Yat-sen’s Republic of China. At the time, the country had five time zones. However, in 1949, Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution replaced this with just one time zone, representing the country’s newfound unity.
As a result, the Sun rises an hour earlier in easternmost China than in Beijing, and three hours later than the capital in the far west.
Some Uighur citizens observe their own unofficial time zone, which is two hours later than China Standard Time, viewing China Standard Time (UTC+8) as a means of suppressing minorities.
In the early 1960s, Greenwich Mean Time was replaced with UTC, which is set not on the Earth’s rotation, but on atomic measurements.
It is adjusted by leap seconds to stay within 0.9 seconds of the mean solar time at the Prime Meridian in Greenwich.
Today, while the UAE and Oman use Gulf Standard Time (UTC+4), Saudi Arabia uses Arabia Standard Time (UTC +3) which is also shared by Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen and Iraq.
In 2008, at a conference held in Qatar called Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice, scholars called for Mecca Mean Time to replace GMT, which they said was a historical remnant of British colonialism.
When the Royal Mecca Clock Tower was completed two years later, some scholars hoped it would replace Big Ben and the Greenwich Observatory as the centre of longitude.
India, meanwhile, still uses a single time zone, though Tarun Gogoi, chief minister of Assam state, last year called for a new time zone to boost productivity.
The Sun rises in Assam an hour before Mumbai, and its famed tea estates have long used UTC+6.30 rather than Indian Standard Time, UTC+5.30.
The creation of Pyongyang Standard Time is just another example of how time can sometimes be anything but standard.
And that the 30 minutes difference between neighbouring South Korea will in practice make little difference to what remains one of the world’s most isolated countries.
halbustani@thenational.ae
