In 1884 Greenwich Mean Time was established as the world standard time.
On the 29th of September 1707 a Royal Naval fleet of 21 ships left Gibraltar and headed home to England but severely bad weather made navigation almost impossible and the fleet got turned around. They headed for what they believed to be an island of Brittany but they were actually headed for an island in Sicily. On the 22nd of October Four of the ships hit rocks and 2,000 men lost their lives in Britain’s worst maritime disaster. The British Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 (around £2,000,000 today) for anyone that could solve the problem of determining longitude around the world.
As the world was round its 360 degrees could be divided into 24 portions of 15 degrees which give us lines of longitude. So if you knew the time in a point of reference and the local solar time (using the method above) you could calculate your position (in this arrangement 1 degree equals a 4 minute difference). King Charles II ordered the construction of the Royal observatory in 1675 to “in order to the finding out of the longtitude of places for perfecting navigation and astronomy” (Charles II). The problem was that all accurate clocks the day used pendulums to keep time and the motion on ships disrupted this. By 1735 inventor John Harrison had created a time piece that used springs instead of a pendulum and this solved the problem.
Prior to this day all major towns and cities in the world set their clocks based on the position of the sun in their own area. 12:00 pm or noon was based on when the sun was directly overhead. This could be determined by placing a rod in the ground and when the shadow pointed directly north, south or disappeared (depending on the time of year) local time was set to noon.
This was adequate and served as a standard for centuries but with the introduction trains in the 1820’s, people would have to reset their pocket watches continually as they travelled long distances. To solve this a standard time was established throughout Britain using the solar time at the Royal Greenwich Observatory as a bases but the rest of the world still required a central point of reference.
The International Meridian Conference was held in Washington DC attended by 51 delegates from 25 nations around the world. On the 13th of October 1884 Greenwich was chosen as the standard time throughout the world from which all clocks would be set and the meridian line which runs through Greenwich would become the centre of longitude (just as the equator marks the centre of latitude).
In 1493 Columbus set out on his second voyage of discovery in the new world.
This was Columbus’s second trip to the region, having found the New World in March the previous year. The Spanish crown funded his second journey and Columbus was given 17 ships and 1,000 men which set sail on the 13th of October 1493. He discovered many islands including Dominica, Guadeloupe and Jamaica; he also returned to Cuba, on the 30th of April 1494, which he had previously discovered.
He left many of his men in various settlements on the way and arrived in Jamaica with a much smaller force. Having promised gold that never materialised, to the Spanish crown, Columbus had been collecting slaves from the places he visited rather than return home empty handed. When Columbus did return, Queen Isabella ordered that the slaves be returned as they were now subjects of Spain. Those that did return didn’t survive long and within 50 years all the original inhabitants of Jamaica were wiped out, from starvation or European diseases that they had no resistance for.
