The person who is late for an important meeting or who forgets an important anniversary will feel that time and date are imperatives that control their lives. It is hard to believe that they are purely constructs of the human mind. Without us, time does not exist. The calendar is a human invention, tied to culture, revised and argued over many times. Moreover, as the world began to function as a unit and countries needed to interact more precisely, it became necessary for nations to sit down together and thrash out some issues about just what day it is today… and when it will officially be tomorrow.
The International Meridian Conference
In October 1884, US President Chester A. Arthur convened a meeting in Washington, D.C., where 41 delegates from 25 nations met to determine a standardized international time and the Greenwich Meridian. Prior to this, there had been several different meridians used and the maps produced in various countries differed in this significant detail.
What is a Meridian?
Meridians are imaginary lines that mark off the globe from the North Pole to the South Pole, dividing it up like segments of an orange, and working around the full 360 degree circumference of the earth. In combination with the horizontal lines of latitude (sometimes called parallels), it is possible to pinpoint a particular spot on earth (including on the oceans) by giving the longitude and latitude references.
It is all very well having 360 of these lines draped down the earth like Maypole ribbons, but how are they to be numbered. Which one is zero, because all the rest have to be numbered from that one? The process of deciding was no more scientific than deciding which end of the street to start numbering the letterboxes. Many countries had already chosen their own Prime Meridian, as the starting point is known.
The Prime Meridian or Greenwich Meridian
British tradition prevailed and it was declared that the Prime Meridian for the world would be the imaginary line that ran through the main telescope at Greenwich Observatory in London. The French refused to accept this and continued to use the Paris Meridian for navigation until 1914 (1911 for timekeeping). Once that was established, the meridian that was directly opposite the Prime Meridian (at 180 degrees) was declared the International Date Line. These two meridians together slice the world into the western and eastern hemispheres.
The International Date Line
So with the blotting of a few signatures, the decision was made that in countries on the east of the 180th meridian line it would be Thursday and on the other side of that line it would be Friday. A new day had begun. However, the solution brought some problems. This lovely straight line just happened to cut through Siberia. This was no good. Consider the problems! A Couple married in one town could honeymoon in a nearby town where they wouldn’t be married until tomorrow. A bank who gave a client 24 hours to pay before foreclosure, could give the client a shove across the line and then claimed they had defaulted.
The solution was that the nice straight meridian just had to be bent. It now curves around to go through the Bering Staits, thus leaving Siberia intact. Then, of course, having zigged, it had to zag, so that the Aleutian Islands , which politically are part of Alaska, wouldn’t be a day ahead of everyone else. Down south, similar problems had to be mended with a few judicious wobbles. The line takes a great loop east to gather up the widely-scattered Kiribati Islands, then ducks back to exclude Tonga. It stays a little wide to ensure Fiji stays in the same day as New Zealand. The east coast town of Gisborne in New Zealand boasts that it is the first city to see the sun rise each day.
Date Line Trivia
Fiji and Tonga are island neighbours. It takes just a few hours to fly from Fiji but travelers arrive in Tonga the day before they left. Unless they have done their homework, they may discover that the hotel room they thought they had booked won’t be available until the next day!
Reverse the flight and the brief island hop has taken some 22 hours. Time is not real. Time is an illusion. Maybe Greenwich is an illusion. President Chester Arthur has a lot to answer for!
Hint for regularly unpunctual employees: print out this article, carry it at all times, and offer it to the boss to read when he or she is about to bawl you out. It’s the perfect justification.
