


DST was initially introduced in 1895 by George Hudson. 37.Īs if this weren't a mess on its own, enter Daylight Saving Time, the practice of advancing clocks during warmer months so that darkness falls later each day according to the clock. Today, there are 37 different local times in use.ģ7.

It took many decades before all time zones were based on some "standard offset" from GMT/UTC. Can we reschedule?īy about 1900, almost all inhabited places on Earth had adopted one or another standard time zone, but only some of these used an hourly offset from GMT. Apologies for missing the call, just realized you're in PST. He also proposed a universal time to be used in astronomy and telegraphy. The concept of time zones was introduced by the Italian mathematician Quirico Filopanti in his book Miranda! in 1858. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries of countries and their subdivisions instead of strictly following longitude, because it is convenient for areas in close commercial or other communication to keep the same time." "A time zone is a region of the globe that observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes. Wikipedia tells us what time zones do, but it stops short of explaining why they don't make sense. Why is this such a big waste of time anyway?.
