1858165438+1October 24th, Dorset, England, the clock was 10: 06 in the morning. At that time, the judge ruled that a land litigant lost the case because he did not appear in court on time on 10, and the litigant appeared in court two minutes later. He told the judge that he arrived on time according to the clock of the railway station in Karel Town, Bolan County, his hometown. He was not convinced and demanded a heavy sentence. Disputes caused by time inconsistency like this often occur in Britain. It was not until 1880 that the British Parliament decided to adopt Greenwich Mean Time as the national unified standard time.
/kloc-in the 9th century, there were three kinds of clocks at Buffalo Railway Station in new york, USA. One is local time in Buffalo, one is new york time, and the other is Columbus time in Ohio. Because of the confusion of timing, it caused a lot of trouble.
Greenwich time
/kloc-since the 0/7th century, navigation has developed vigorously, and many navigation countries have built observatories to better determine the position of ships at sea.
1675, King charles ii decided to build the Royal Observatory-Greenwich Observatory in Greenwich Park on the outskirts of London. At that time, the main task of this observatory was to accurately measure the position of stars. Thirty years later, it published a catalogue called British Planetarium, which recorded detailed astronomical information. 1767, the British nautical almanac was published, which appeared as the international time-Greenwich Mean Time in the astronomical almanac, and the universal time at that time was Greenwich Mean Time.
Greenwich Observatory is located on the south bank of the Thames, 8 kilometers east of ancient London. This is a beautiful place with a history of more than 300 years.
1948, due to the crowded and foggy city of London, the observatory was moved to a hill in the ancient city of Hearst Monte (east longitude 0 0' 25 ",time difference 8 1 s).
The original site serves as the National Ocean Museum, where, in addition to displaying various observation instruments used in the early days of the Observatory, there is also a "meridian hall" for the public to display and visit.
In the meridian hall, there is a room dedicated to storing meridian instruments. Its base is engraved with a vertical line, which is the prime meridian. The English on the meridian instrument is: the world prime meridian. On both sides of a white vertical line, East longitude and West longitude are written respectively. There is a copper wire embedded in the marble of Ziwu Hall, and the copper wire also extends to the concrete floor outside the wall. When tourists come here, they all like to stand at the door, put their feet on both sides of the copper wire and take an interesting photo as a souvenir-the 0 meridian passes under their feet. On the brick wall outside the meridian hall, there is a 24-hour big standard clock, which is installed at 185 1.
The new Greenwich Observatory was built in Fort Hurstmont in15th century, located in Sussex, more than 0/00 kilometers away from London/kloc-0. Surrounded by green mountains, there are city walls and moats, covering an area of about 15 hectares. On the surrounding hills, seven dome observatories and research buildings, large and small, have been built around the castle, which are equipped with the most accurate timekeeping instruments in the world: atomic clocks, Newton astronomical telescopes with a diameter of 249 cm, many smaller telescopes and observation equipment, as well as sophisticated astronomical instruments and electronic computers. An aluminum house the size of a garage is the jacking pipe of an astronomical camera, pointing to the starry sky, constantly taking pictures of passing stars and automatically recording the time.
There are more than 200 astronomers and technicians living here. They observe day and night and calculate the exact time. Then, they are transmitted to the BBC through six electronic speakers and broadcast to Britain and the world. In order to make up for the change of the geographical position of Greenwich Observatory, 865,438+0 seconds were added to the calculation time.
Astronomers in Greenwich admit that the current time is not absolutely correct. Because astronomy has different results in calculating time, even the most accurate atomic clock has errors. Therefore, every year before midnight on New Year's Eve, the engineers of the Observatory sometimes add or subtract one second to "correct" the time-"leap second" on Greenwich Mean Time.