CLOCK TRICKERIES

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 257, 26 July 1930, Page 4

CLOCK TRICKERIES

What’s the Time in Timbucktu?

So many questions have been asked concerning the time problems that it is perhaps simplest to reply to them in one general comprehensive note. Our time is merely a man-made thing instituted so that we all go to bed round about the midnight end of the clock, and get up round about, the sixes, the sevens, the eights, or even the nines of the clock. When you travel from one place to another all manner of troubles start almost at once. If your watch remained set at its starting time and continued to keep good time, there would come a day I when you went to bed at the times you usually got up and vice versa. Breakfast would be nt dinner time, and the whole day would be upset. For this reason ships alter their clocks regularly every day, so that we may have the pleasure of clinging to our time standards. ■■ ■ - ■■■ • . : Greenwich is the father of time so far as we are concerned. Every place on the longitude of Greenwich sets its habits by Greenwich time. Midday at, Greenwich is also midday at Akkra, on the west coast of Africa, neilrly midday at Timbucktu, nnd nearly midday at Gough Island, in the South Atlantic (apart of course from local summer times and all that sort of thing). As you go west or east from th longitude of Greenwich the time will alter either faster or slower than Greenwich. The way to remember which is which is by the rhyme “West Greenwich best; East Greenwich least.” When it is midday at Greenwich it is only time to get up in New York and 4 in the morning in Vancouver. If you go east it will be

lea time at Omsk and bed time in Japan, r urther efest one comes to the troublesome date line where one trespasses into another day. In theory roughly this ,lne r "us right through the Pacific on the 180th > longitude, passing close to East Cape 'in New Zealand. In practice it has beert found more /serviceable to permit adjacent islands belonging to one nation to efijoy the same day. Thus by international agreement the date line zig-zags down the Pacific, where it can cause the leaSjt muddle. The result is that il: * s . nnidday in Greenwich it is 11.30 p.m. in i New Zealand on the same (my. ,A few hundred miles cast of the Dominion, hotvever, it is la.m. on the day before. “East is East and West is ’’ eat,, you know the rhyme—well, thev do meet, on the date line, a delightful spot where yotu can step from Monday into Sunday juiit as you please.