2009 Momentum - Glashütte Original

16 Momentum 1· 2009
Moments Universal time
UTC + 4 | Georgia
South of the Greater Caucasus, you
have to put your watch four hours
ahead
and the left-hand clock showed the time in Paris, which was 20
minutes behind Bern – and the trains leaving Geneva for Paris ran
according to Paris time. So it was clear that the world’s railways
would benefit tremendously if the times could be standardized.
Fleming’s proposal was that the world should be divided into
large equal-sized sections – time zones – within which a uniform
time would apply.
Five years later, in October 1884, Fleming’s wish was
granted. Representatives from 25 nations met at the Inter national
Meridian Conference in Washington D.C. to determine the Prime
Meridian – an imaginary line running from the North to the South
Pole that would serve as the starting point for all the other equidistant
meridians circling the planet. During the conference, a victor
emerged from among the five proposed candidates for the Prime
Meridian. This was the Greenwich Meridian, named after the Royal
Greenwich Observatory on the outskirts of London. In many
respects, the Greenwich Meridian seemed the obvious choice as
it had long been the reference meridian for celestial navigation
and nautical maps. Since 1880 it had also decided the official time
in the United Kingdom – Greenwich Mean Time, which was now
to become the basis for calculating the time across the whole planet.
UTC -4 | Barbados
Time moves at a different pace on
the Lesser Antilles – four hours behind
UTC
UTC + 3 | Moscow
Muscovites are getting ahead of
Londoners – by three hours
UTC -5 | Toronto
When we’re gulping down our lunch
in Europe, residents of Canada’s
biggest city are still lingering over
breakfast
UTC +2 | Egypt
The pyramids are timeless – so who
cares about a couple of hours here
or there?
UTC + 1 | Berlin
Modern Berlin is ahead of its time?
Well, it’s one hour ahead of UTC, at
least!
After agreement had been reached on where to locate the Prime
Meridian, the earth could be divided up into 24 equally sized time
zones, defined as the area between two lines of longitude 15°
apart. The time in each zone was one hour before or after that of
its neighbouring zones. This made timekeeping much easier – and
not just for the railways.
However, the time zones only follow the meridians
in theory. In practice, political boundaries and geographical facts
have to be considered; time zones often ignore a meridian in
favour of national borders. In principal each country belongs to
one specific time zone, but larger countries can stretch over several.
Australia, for example, has four separate time zones, Canada has
five, the US has six and Russia, the biggest country on earth,
covers a whopping eleven time zones. Even Indonesia has three,
as its archipelago is widely dispersed from West to East. China
constitutes a remarkable exception: with a breadth of over 2,600
miles it actually spans five different time zones. Yet the whole of
the People’s Republic has one official time, from the autonomous
regions in the west to Manchuria in the far east and incorporating
Hong Kong, Macau and even Taiwan. Chinese time is UTC+8 and
is based on the geographical location of the country’s most impor-
UTC -6 | Costa Rica
On the lush strip of land between the
Caribbean and the Pacific, the time is
six hours behind UTC
UTC -7 | Mexico
The United States’ southern neighbour
is three time zones wide, with
the Gulf of Mexico seven hours behind
Greenwich