TIME ZONES

Imagine you make up with your friend to call them at 2 p.m. Five minutes before 2 pm, you get ready to call, but your mother says that you need to wait another three hours. In New York, it’s 2 p.m., but in California where your friend lives, it is only 11 o’clock in the morning.

Until the 1800s, people would look at the sun to tell time. When the sun came up in the morning, they knew it was time to wake up. When the sun was high in the sky, they knew it was afternoon. But since the earth is round, what is afternoon in one place is still morning somewhere else. This means that while it’s bright and daytime in one place, it’s dark and nighttime in another place on the other side of the Earth.

Each town had a large town clock that was set based on the position of the sun. People in the town would look at the clock to know the time, and they would set their own clocks to the same time. This helped everyone in one town be on the same schedule.

▸ A sign in honor of the USA starting to use the time zone system

Did you know?

• Russia is split up into 11 time zones!

• China is a big country but chose to stay as one time zone. Therefore, in some places in China, the sun only rises at 10 am.

In the late 1800s, trains that traveled long distances were invented. When the railway companies tried to tell people what times the train would come, they realized that people would not know which town’s clock to use, and most people would probably miss their trains.

In 1878, Sir Sandford Fleming had the idea of creating a system of time zones. Instead of each town having its own time, he split the

Time zones today for the United States world into 24 parts. Each part had its own time that was an hour earlier than the time zone next to it. time zones - parts of the world that have the same time multiple- a few implement - to put something into use official - made fully accepted

Greenwich, England, was chosen to be the center of time for the whole world. Each time zone to the west of Greenwich is one hour earlier. Each time zone to the east of Greenwich is one hour later. California is three time zones west of New York. That’s why when it is 2 pm in New York, it is 11 am in California. Most countries are in a one time zone, but some large countries, like the USA and Russia, are split into multiple, meaning a few, time zones.

On November 18, 1883, American railroads implemented Sir Sandford Fleming’s time zones. Implement means to put something into use. They used four time zones in the United States — Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern.

In 1918, a law called The Standard Time Act made time zones official in the United States. Official means made fully accepted.

In 2023, the USA and its territories use nine time zones—Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Hawaii-Aleutian, Alaska, Samoa, Wake Island, and Guam.