Some time zone issues that played a part in historical events and tragedies... including the sinking of the Titanic!

First Thing´s First

Before we hear about the Titanic, let’s first figure out what time zones are anyway.

Time zones are areas on Earth that have a specific time that all citizens of those regions set their clocks to. And these time zones start at a place — an imaginary place — called the prime meridian. This imaginary line runs vertically through the United Kingdom and splits the globe into the Eastern Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere. All other time zones are set based on this imaginary line.

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the time zone that runs along the prime meridian, symbolizing the universal starting point for every time zone in the world. Today, that time zone is formally known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), but GMT is the term  more commonly used.

Why Time Zones?

Now you may be wondering why we need time zones if they’re all based on an imaginary line that leads to more imaginary lines. I mean, we all like to imagine things, but lines… why?!

Before the world had established time zones, every city had its own local time. Towns based their local time on when the sun was directly overhead (that was noon). That basically worked until mass transportation, in the form of trains, began to run. If trains were to run on schedule and not get into accidents, there needed to be set times everywhere. It couldn’t be 12:00 in one town and 12:15 in the village next door. In fact, there were 144 different local times in America in 1883, and thousands of times around the world!