Re: CHAT: Timezones was The English/French counting system

At 05:36 16/09/03, Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

>If as I assume UTC = GMT, why should we in this country (-4 to -7 hours), or
>the Japanese, Indians et al adjust our mental clocks to such outmoded
>Cultural Imperialism?  London no longer rules the world's commerce; at least
>we should make NYC the standard.:-)))  And probably in 50-100 years, we'll
>all be on Beijing time.  :-(((

This really has little to do with cultural imperialism; Universal Time was
defined as GMT by an *international* conference in the 1890s.  There was
only one vote against (Dominica) and one abstention (France).  As
international agreements go, not bad.  I admit I don't know how many
countries sent representatives.

The reason for selecting GMT had nothing to do with London being the centre
of commerce (in which case the City, rather than Greenwich, would define
the prime meridian).  The deciding factor was a practical consideration:
the majority of the world's shipping (by tonnage, at least) already used
Greenwich as the prime meridian, thanks to the publications of the observatory.

Of course, there's no particular reason to stick to GMT - except that, once
you've got international agreement on a standard, its pretty daft to open
the can of worms again by trying to change it without a very good reason.

Myself, I've long been in favour of using GMT no matter where one is in the
world (including when I lived in places other than Britain!).  To my mind
it simplifies things more than it complicates them; but then I suppose I've
always been in favour of things that make travel, communication, etc. easier.

Ian

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