Royd Waters, age lly of Salt Lake City, Utah, for his question:

When were time zones first made?

Time marches westward and every day the 24 hours complete a moving circle around the world. In the 1500s, this moving time schedule baffled the globe circling mariner, Sir Francis Drake. Many later travelers also were confused by the fact that when is related to where. This problem of local and global time was solved in stages, through several centuries. The final answer was neat and simple. It was reached when the time zones were put in place    less than 90 years ago.

Sir Francis Drake sailed westward around the world and returned to England in the fall of 1580. He was shocked to learn that the calendars at home were a day behind his ship's records. How had he miscounted and which saint's day had he failed to observe? Drake was unaware that because time moves westward, anyone who circles the globe westward skips one day forward.

Navigators soon learned how this global time schedule works. Their maps were charted from pole to pole with 360 meridian lines of longitudes. The sun and stars cross 15 degrees of longitude every hour and complete their westward circle every 24 hours. Sailors observed the heavenly parade to chart their courses by dead reckoning. The seafaring British knew that a global system of navigation must be keyed to longitudes and a time keeping center. In 1675, they established a precise timekeeping center at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, on Longitude 0 degrees    the Prime Meridian. In the 1700s,.they offered a big prize for a reliable sea going clock to keep sailors in accurate touch with Greenwich time.

But these steps failed to solve the everyday problems of local and global time. Sailors still were confused by time changes in Europe and America. When railroads spanned the continents, things grew downright chaotic. According to local time, trains from the east arrived early and those from the west were late. Then a solution occurred to Stanford Fleming, who had masterminded the wide Canadian Pacific Railroad. During the 1870s, he talked with Charles Dowd of the United States and others about dividing the continent into time zones. The sensible idea took form and the world was ready for it.

On October 11, 1883, the railroads of Canada and the United States agreed to divide their wide continent into four time zones. In the same year, an international convention in Washington D.C. agreed to section the entire globe into 24 time zones. Each zone included roughly 15 degrees of longitude, the hourly distance of the sun. The neat system was keyed to those reliable Greenwich timekeepers on the Prime Meridian. After centuries of confusion, the time zones have been solving the problems of local and global time for the past 88 years.

Nowadays, the Greenwich Observatory radios its precise time signals around the world. Each eastward time zone is one hour ahead and each zone westward is one hour behind. The Prime Meridian marks the moment of mid day and the new day begins along meridian 180, on the opposite side of the globe. If this Date Line had been invented in 1580, poor Sir Francis Drake would have known how and just where he gained a calendar day.