The coming of the trains
It was the emergence of new technologies, in particular the railways in the 1830s, that forced a wider reform of the time system, and with it the adoption of a single Prime Meridian. Whilst local time had sufficed in the age of the horse drawn carriage, it was inappropriate for the railways. When it was midday local time in Bristol for example, it was already ten past twelve in London some 100 miles to the east. In order to make the timetable workable, instead of using local times, the railway companies introduced a single standard time across their network. In mainland Britain, this was Greenwich Mean Time – a time that was chosen because time signals were available directly from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich via the electric telegraph. In mainland Britain however, the time difference between the most easterly and westerly points is only about 30 minutes – significantly less than the four hours on mainland USA.
The coming of the trainsIt was the emergence of new technologies, in particular the railways in the 1830s, that forced a wider reform of the time system, and with it the adoption of a single Prime Meridian. Whilst local time had sufficed in the age of the horse drawn carriage, it was inappropriate for the railways. When it was midday local time in Bristol for example, it was already ten past twelve in London some 100 miles to the east. In order to make the timetable workable, instead of using local times, the railway companies introduced a single standard time across their network. In mainland Britain, this was Greenwich Mean Time – a time that was chosen because time signals were available directly from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich via the electric telegraph. In mainland Britain however, the time difference between the most easterly and westerly points is only about 30 minutes – significantly less than the four hours on mainland USA.
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