Who proposed that the Earths surface be divided into 24 time zones 1 for each hour of the day when?

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Question #40095. Asked by ulazybum.
Last updated Aug 26 2021.

There are 25. The Province of Newfoundland in Canada has its own, but instead of there being an hour difference between it and the next, its a half hour.

I went to

There are 24. Whatever time a.m. it is in your country, it will be exactly the same time p.m. in another country (which is 12 time zones ahead of or behind your country). If you travel from one country near one side of the International Date Line to another, although it may only take a few minutes, you can have lost or gained a day.

The world is divided into 24 zones. However at any instant, there are 31 different local times in the world because several countries have zones which are not integer hours. Labrador, Canada is -3.5 GMT; Iraq is +3.5 GMT; Iran is +4.5 GMT; India is +5.5 GMT; Myanmar (Burma) is +6.5; Central Australia is +9.5 GMT and there are Chatham islands to east of New Zealand which are +12.75 GMT, the extreme east of Russia is +13 GMT. However I think there is no country with time zone for -11 GMT.

* There is -11GMT time zone, so that makes 32 in all (not counting daylight saving time zones.)

There are at least 31 time zones. They range from 12 hours behind GMT (Kiribati) to 13 hours ahead (Tonga), which makes 26 zones. In addition there are some zones which are half an hour displaced from the ones beside them: Marquesas Islands (-9.5), Newfoundland (-3.5), India (+5.5), Burma (+6.5) and Norfolk Islands (+11.5).

There may be a few others I can't see on my timezone map.

Not sure how many (if any) of the "extra" ones are truly internationally recognised as genuine time zones. Since the introduction of GMT and the line of zero longitude, the French disputed that it should run through London (and time be determined from there) insisting that it should be Paris instead. This being the case, the French had their own time zone PMT, Paris Mean Time, differing by about 2 degrees longitude and 9 minutes 22 seconds from Greenwich and GMT. This meant it was still in time with the rest of the world but that GMT was really 9m22s behind the true meridian. This was still "upheld" by the French even after International agreement in 1884 (and they had been arguing for about 100 years) that GMT be the zero meridian and recognised as THE CENTRE OF TIME. The French kept this insistance (and their "own" time zone) right up until the late 1970's, where upon they recognised GMT "for the first time". HOWEVER, things are afoot YET AGAIN. The French are to resurrect PMT (unfortunate acronym) yet again. "LE MERIDIEN" is to be marked with trees and olive groves running nearly 1000 km through France joining 337 towns together.

India falls into 2 time zones and instead of having half the country at +5 and the other half at +6, they have elected to set all clocks to 5.5. I believe that this is a fairly recent development and in the days of the British Empire, India had the "genuine" 2 time zones. In the mid 1800's hundreds of different times were adopted, each one corresponding to its own meridian. To simplify this situation, the Earth surface was divided into 24 adjacent, equal and equatorially perpendicular wedges, called time zones, each one delimited by two meridian forming a hour angle of 1 hour at the poles. The mean solar time of the central meridian of each time zone was assigned by convention to all places belonging to the time zone. The Greenwich time zone, centered on the homonymous meridian, was taken as reference time zone. In this way, the time zone right eastward Greenwich is 1 hour in advance in comparison with universal time (UT +01:00), while the time zone right westward Greenwich is 1 hour late (UT -01:00) and so on for all the others. The time zones division was officially adopted on 1884 November 1 at the International Meridian Conference held at Washington D.C. The figure shows the time zones division of the world. For political and administrative reasons, often the time zones are delimited by state borders instead of meridians. Some countries adopt a time different from their time zone.

[toi.iriti.cnr.it/uk/timezone.html#TIMEZONE] link no longer exists

As of 2016, there are about 39 time zones instead of 24 (as popularly believed). This is due to fractional hour offsets and zones with offsets larger than 12 hours near the International Date Line.

Jan 12 2008, 1:16 PM

Dividing the world into 24 equal geographically-based time zones was a smart idea, but didn't take into account political boundaries or human preferences. I did some research last year on this in conjunction with a study on the impact railroads have had in the US. First in England, and then in the US, time zones were established because of the railroad's need for more exact scheduling. ZB's second list gives some 87 different zones, if I counted correctly, which I may not have. (Counting isn't my favorite hobby.) This following link goes to a list of 37 distinct zones formed by dividing up zones C, D, E, F, H, I, K, L, M, Q, and P into half- and even quarter-hour zones. This is without mentioning the chaos created each summer when parts of the globe are on Daylight Saving Time.

25... I live in Newfoundland. It's a half hour off Caracas and a half hour off Buenos Aires, it is the 25th

Response last updated by gtho4 on Aug 26 2021.
Aug 11 2009, 11:03 PM

Due to a number of countries using :30 and :15 offsets, there are actually 39 time zones across the world. (Compare: 24 hours in a day.)

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