Attempts to get agreement on changing the astronomical day continued to go nowhere. But in the same way that the coming of the railways had heralded changes to national timekeeping, it was the arrival of wireless telegraphy with its potential to widely disseminate time signals that gave the impetus that was to lead to global uniformity. And France was in the vanguard of change, establishing a transmitter on the Eiffel Tower and a leadership role for itself from the first. And if it wanted to lead, it had to conform and transmit time signals in Greenwich time rather than Paris time. With neither fanfare nor ceremony, France adopted Greenwich Mean Time as its civil time on 11 March 1911, referring to it as ‘the mean time of Paris retarded nine minutes and 21 seconds’. At this point, although France still declined to adopt the Greenwich Meridian; the seeds for change had already been sown. The Bureau des Longitudes had expressed a desire to find a way of increasing the number of stars covered in its annual publications without increasing the cost. This it was thought might best be done by a change in working practices. Instead of different observatories around the world producing their own sets of what were often similar if not identical tables, something that involved extensive duplication of time consuming calculations, could the work load not be spread between them and the results shared? But to do this, the astronomers would need to work to a common set of standards, which included the calculations being based on just a single meridian using a single time system. When the International Congress on Astronomical Ephemeredes met for the first time in Paris on 23 October 1911, the use of the Greenwich Meridian was unanimously agreed. However, the French astronomers had no jurisdiction over the publication of France’s hydrographic charts and could not themselves order a change in the meridian on which they were based.