International Meridian Conference

1883, the Metro Opera House, New York City, opens.

1884, the International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. adopts 24 Greenwich Meridian time zones worldwide.

1885, baseball players secretly meet... and formed Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, which came known as the First Baseball Union.

1906, Henry Ford becomes president of the Ford Motor Company.

Insurance claims, banking wires, and trade contracts all operated on definitions of now that shifted depending on which country was doing the counting.

United States President Chester Arthur called for a solution, and in October 1884, delegates from 25 nations gathered in Washington, DC for the International Meridian Conference, tasked with settling one specific question: Where should the world's maps and clocks start counting from? Britain arrived with an advantage nobody could easily argue against.

Over 70% of the world's shipping tonnage already used Greenwich reference charts, not because any treaty required it, but because the British naval charts and almanacs had simply become the most widely trusted and available.

Still, agreeing to formalize what most of the world already did in practice meant every other nation had to publicly concede the point, and that made the negotiations far more political than technical.

Um, and, uh, what we experience today with our international time zone system really c- um, came out of, of longitude and cartography really.

It was a need to have a single meridian across the world that inspired the International Meridian Conference in 1884 in Washington, in which the, the principal concern was having an agreed meridian for cartography so that, um, all the charts in the world would relate to one meridian.

And at that point, 72% of the world's shipping were using charts, global charts with Greenwich as the prime meridian.

And so although of course it was going to be a political decision, it was, it, it could be argued that it was very much a common sense decision that, um, Greenwich was chosen at that point.

said p.m. instead of a.m. And that really sparked an obsession that, you know what, like there need to be there does need to be standardized time zones so that everybody kind of knows where they are relative to other people all over the world in terms of And so that was in 1876.

In 1884, the International Meridian Conference convened in Washington, D.C., and they divided the planet into the 24 standard time zones that we use today.

So without my buddy Chris Moles, welcome to the change edition of the Men of Peace podcast.

Psalm 3737, mark the blameless and behold the upright, for there is a future for the man of peace.