The information for the following story is from these Internet sites accessed 04/14/03:
http://www.geog.ouc.bc.ca/physgeog/contents/2c.html
http://www.sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/TimeZone.html
http://wamadesign.virtualave.net/canadaeh/about/timezone.html
http://greenwichmeantime.com/

How The World Became "On Time"

Before the nineteenth century, people set their clocks according to the sun. Noon was when the sun was at its highest peak during the day. Each town would have its own clock, placed in the middle of town and citizens would set their clocks according to the official town clock.

In North America people started moving "out west" in the late nineteenth century. New settlements and railroads were being built. People realized their way of keeping time was not working well. Each town was on a different time schedule, and it was hard to keep scheduled railway stops in all the towns. Being off a few minutes here and there caused a lot of problems.

In 1878, a Canadian man named Sir Sanford Fleming came up with a time zone system. Mr. Fleming's idea was that the world be divided up into twenty-four time zones. Each time zone would be fifteen degrees of longitude in width. Mr. Fleming said the world rotates once every 24 hours, and the earth has 360 degrees of longitude, so every time the earth rotated an hour meant 15 degrees of longitude.