2009 Momentum - Glashütte Original

UTC + 12 | New Zealand
The other side of the world from
Greenwich: when it’s midday here,
most Europeans are tucked up in bed
Y
our plane must have been a supersonic jet,”
marvelled the son of my old friend from Boston
as we turned onto the busy Interstate 90 from
Logan International Airport. “I wish it had been,”
I laughed. I would have gladly traded my eighthour
journey from Germany for a supersonic
flight in an X-15, but once again I had made the trip to New
England in a bog-standard airbus travelling at a leisurely 545 mph.
“But the flight only took you two hours,” insisted the little boy.
He had clearly heard that my flight had left Frankfurt in Germany
at noon and landed in Boston at 2 p.m. Of course, every adult
knows that this means 12 and 2 p.m. local time, but how do you
explain the concept of time zones to someone who is only just
learning the difference between the big and little hand? It’s no easy
task, since it involves explaining concepts like the Prime Meridian,
lines of longitude and UTC – Coordinated Universal Time. It’s a
long story, but maybe the best way to explain it is by starting with
the classic “once upon a time”…
Once upon a time there was a clever man called
Sandford Fleming. He lived in Kirkcaldy by the Firth of Forth on the
eastern coast of Scotland. At the age of 18 he emigrated to Canada,
where he initially worked as a surveyor and then became a distin-
UTC + 8 | Lombok
Indonesia has three time zones and
Lombok is right in the middle at
UTC+8
UTC + 11 | New Caledonia
They may belong to France, but on
these South Pacific islands the
clocks are ten hours ahead of those
back in Paris
UTC + 7 | Bangkok
In Thailand, the “Land of the Free”,
the clocks are seven hours ahead of
those in Greenwich
UTC + 10 | Sydney
Culture vultures in Sydney go to the
opera ten hours before their counterparts
in London
UTC + 9 | Japan
In the Land of the Rising Sun Japan
Standard Time applies: UTC+9
guished railway engineer and a founding member of the Royal
Society of Canada. Now, in 1879 this clever Scotsman proposed
the first system of time zones for standardizing international timekeeping,
which he named “railway time”. In his work as a railway
engineer, Fleming had constantly encountered problems due to
the different times kept in the places along his routes. Every town
had its own time as the clocks were adjusted according to the
position of the sun in the sky: when the sun was at its highest, it
was (more or less) 12 noon. With the introduction of telegraphy
in the early 19th century, it became possible to set a single time
for an entire country – usually the time in the respective country’s
capital city. However, this meant that just over the border a different
time was used. This was a huge administrative headache for railway
companies, which had to write timetables for long routes spanning
several countries, all of which had different times. Often it was only
a matter of a few minutes, but these were enough to bring the
whole timetable into disarray.
The complexity of the situation is exemplified by an
old clock tower in Geneva. In 1880 it had three clocks displaying
three different times. The right-hand clock showed the time in
Bern, which applied to all of Switzerland; the central clock showed
the local time in Geneva, which was five minutes behind Bern,
UTC + 6 | Bangladesh
When it’s noon in Greenwich, in the
“Country of Bengal” the big hand is
pointing to the 6
UTC + 5 | Pakistan
The Islamic Republic is five hours
ahead of UTC
Momentum 1· 2009
15