The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1918. STANDARD TIME.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVII, Issue 43, 16 September 1918, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1918. STANDARD TIME.

The question of the adoption of a standard time has often been discussed, and at Berne in 1890 an international conference was held to go into' the matter of correlating the local times in different countries. It was decided to invite all nations to join| in a scheme for the standardisation of time, the basic principle of the scheme being that all standard times should differ from Greenwich time by an integral number of hours. The scheme has been very largely adopted, and out of a list of 201 times given in the international Postal Guide 99'show standard time. The whole of Europe has come into line with the exception of Russia, Holland and Portugal. Not a few of the localities standing out are British colonies and dependencies.

Until well on in last century every i town of any importance kept i|s own j time, lint as places became linked by the telegraph and quick trains such : an arrangement was found liighly iu- ) convenient, and long before any action was taken by the State the railway companies of Great Britain had agreed to keep Greenwich mean time. It was not till 1880 that an Act was passed making Greenwich time the official lime for Great Britain, and Dublin time for Ireland. In the United State's with its sixty degrees of breadth as against Great Britain’s eight, the question of local times was mueh more pressing and in 1880 a system of time zones, each fifteen degrees wide, was adopted. These zones had as (heir time meridians, the 75th, 90th, 105th and 120th parallels of west longitude, the respective times being five, six, seven and eight hours behind Greenwich mean time. 'The same, zones were adopted for Canada, with the addition of the 60th parallel for the eastern part, which is one hour nearer to Greenwich. More recently somewhat s'»iilar zones have been established in M J

Australia. As long ago as 1868 New Zealand, by statute established a legal standard time for the whole colony. A commission presided over by the late Dr Hector recommended I a.s the time meridian latitude T<2 dog 30 min west, which differed irom the mean lattitude of the laud area, the population and the principal ports, but offered the advantage of being exactly llhrs 30min ahead of Greenwich. Now Zealand led the way in this useful principle of adopting a meridian making the difference from Greenwich an even figure. About two years ago, a proposal was made by the 'Wellington Philosophical society, and endorsed by the New Zea land Institute, that the Government be requested to amend New Zealand standard time by adopting as our time meridian the 180th parallel of longitude, thus making our time exactly twelve hours ahead of Greenwich. It is understood that the Government has deferred consideration of the matter till after the war. All that would then be necessary would he to advance the. clocks by half an hour once and for all, which seems a better course than is proposed under the “daylight saving , scheme”—putting the clocks an hour forward at the beginning of the summer and back an hour at the end of summer. It is to he noted that the whole of the North Island and part of the South Island are to the east of our present time meridian, and th e centre of gravity of population has moved considerably to the east since' this meridian was adopted, in 1903 Mr T. King read a paper before the Wellington Philosophical Society combating the proposal to adopt the 180th parallel, and ho contended that the spread of the Dominion from oust to west was so wide that it would be necessary to have two zones, one twelve hours and the other eleven hours ahead of Greenwich. Tins argument is weakened by the fact that though the range from the new parallel to the westernmost part of the South Island is 131 degrees, other countries have a greater range—Germany 15 degrees, Austria-Hungary 17 degrees and South Africa 18 degrees. The proposal for a universal day. a very drastic and important change in the matter of standard time was seriously considered at the .International Congress at Washington in 188-1, when the meridian of Greenwich was suggested as the one time meridian. A radical change which would follow on the adoption of a universal day would be a single reckoning of the hours from 1 to 24, instead of the repeated series of 1 to 12, when our afternoon reckoning up to midnight would remain as it is, but from midnight onwards the hours would be designated by numbers between 13 and 21. It would appear a little odd at first for New Zealanders to speak of breakfasting at 20 o’clock, hut in India they would, bo worse off, their daylight hours being numbered from 12 to 24. We would, however, soon get used to the change and there are practical advantages in it. We would get rid of the necessity of discribing an hour as a.m. or p.m.— the statement of an hour would indicate the time absolutely without any reference to the longitude of the locality. Under the international scheme all standard, times are referred to Greenwich, the time being faster than Greenwich in travelling eastward and slower than Greenwich in travelling westward, until the two systems meet on the 180th parallel of longitude. Fiji time is llhr 56 rain ahead of Greenwich and the time of the island of Futuna about the same time behind Greenwich, although Futuna enjoys the sunrise a quarter of an hour earlier than I Fiji. It so happens that the 180th parallel is traced almost entirely on the ocean, otherwise the inconveniences arising from tin’s convention \ would he most serious. The adoption of a universal day would remove all ambiguity and there would hp no I necessity for the operation, so mysterious to the uninitiated, of inserting or dropping a day on the voyage to or from New Zealand to Vancouver. The day and the hour would be fixed for all the world by the position of | the meridian of Greenwich.