Talk:Sandford Fleming's Postage Stamp/@comment-24588058-20170916032209/@comment-1674153-20170916045623

Precedent, mostly. I'm sure some English pride had something to do with it, too. See, while standardized time wasn't set up for people in North America until Flemming, Britain had set up standardized time in the 1840s. And before that, longitude and GMT had already been set up back in the 1700s by British parliament because of the need for ships to accurately be able to understand their position. This is why the marine chronometer was built. The marine chronometer, and all mechanisms of Western globalized time measurement that came after it, utilized a base of time set up by the precedent established by the Royal Observatory, which had by then about a century of providing star charts and clock alignments to the country and was held in high esteem. The Royal Observatory was (though no longer since the 1950s) located in Greenwich Castle, in Greenwich. It's important to note that prior to standardized time, towns the world over would set their own time zones, relying on a singular and well known solar clock in the area - Greenwich being one of them. There were over 300 local times in the United States alone prior to Fleming's system. What Fleming did that established Greenwich as the meridian for standard time was be vocal enough to instigate a meeting known as the 1884 International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, where 41 delegates from 25 nations all got together to discuss where the point for Standardized time should be measured. They eventually, and I imagine there was likely some squabbling because everyone would have wanted to keep their time zones, agreed to utilize Greenwich yet again due to it already being the standard point of time for both the British Isles as well as naval personnel on the whole. Interestingly enough, however, Flemming's initial proposed system never went through. For instance, he never actually wanted Greenwich to represent 0 as a degree - he wanted it as a neutral 180, with longitudes that would decrease to zero going west and increase to 360 going east. The Conference ended up going with the -180 to +180 plan we see today, so if you've ever wondered why the fuck longitude is confusing, that's why. Another one of his ideas was the implementation of a 24-hour clock, like military time, because he had become irritated over missing a train when a misprint on his ticket replaced the a.m. with a p.m., but his big goal was to have Cosmic Time implemented, which meant every hour would have been shared by every clock on the planet.