SAMOA'S TIME

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 13, 17 January 1922, Page 7

SAMOA'S TIME

AN INTERESTING PROBLEM.

(IHITI* FMin ASIOCIATION.—CMIRIMT.)

(AUSTRALIAN • NEW ZEALAND CABLB ASSOCIATION.) , (Received January 17, 12.15 p.m.) . LONDON, 16th January. The question of Samoan time is exercising the Colonial Office and the Greenwich authorities. New Zealand proposes to alter the international date line to bring it eifst of British Samoa. The Admiralty approves this step, but the alteration would make a day difference between' New Zealand and American time in Samoa, and would cause obvious complications in the islands. Decision has therefore been postponed.

' [The meridian of Greenwich is inteiv nationally recognised as the "zero," not only of longitude, but; of time calculation, and places in all oUier longitudes are reckoned as "fast" or "slow" on Greenwich time. When, it is- noon at Greenwich it is midnight on the meridian of 180 degrees, which passes from pole to pole, a little to the east of New Zealand. \At that time, if it is Stmdsy night to the east of the meridian, it is Monday morning west of it. The meridian liea almost wholly at sea; -but it is no respecter of nationalism, and it cuts through various island groups as well as across the eastern extremity of the Asiatic Continent. In order to avoid ths complication of having two days at once in a territory, it has been internationally agreed that the line shall be conventionally fixed so that, while it follows the meridian in a general sense, it swings east or west in places so as to pass round the divided territories. Thus it passed to the eastward through Behring Strait, and westward to bring the Alentian Islands into the American day; and in the Pacific several divergencies are made. Samoa is on tha eastern side of the line, and so are the Cook Islands, so that to-day, for instance, it is Monday in those .places. The proposal to carry the line east of British Samoa is intended to give the day in Samoa the came name it has in New Zealand.]