Second Life’s 8th Birthday: Time Zones
June 16, 2011Local Time: What Time Is It, Really?
Our celebration of magic transcending space and time for SL8B also includes an interactive triton multi-time zone map display that controls our triple time zone clock to highlight time zone differences across the globe. A single script drives three maps that can be independently changed to display any three time zones with just a click. Throughout history seemingly magical time devices have been developed in the quest to unify time across the globe.
Before the late 1800s, timekeeping was only done locally; people set their watches and clocks using the local town clock, which was set to noon each day when the sun reached its zenith. Traveling between cities meant having to reset your pocket watch to the local time when visiting.
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was adopted across the island of Great Britain by the Railway Clearing House in 1847, and by almost all railway companies by the following year.It was gradually adopted for other purposes, but a legal case in 1858 held “local mean time” to be the official time. This changed in 1880, when GMT was legally adopted throughout the island of Great Britain. Hourly time signals from Greenwich Observatory were first broadcast on 5 February 1924, rendering the time ball at the observatory obsolete in the process.
When mass transit by rail enabled people to quickly travel great distances, the time schedules for the railroads quickly became very confusing because of all the different local times. After missing a train in Ireland in 1876, Scottish-born Sir Sanford Fleming of Canada proposed a brilliant worldwide system of 24 time zones spaced 15 degrees of longitude apart to solve this problem and vastly improve the efficiency of rail transport.
Universal Time: A Global Standard
In 1884, an International Prime Meridian Conference convened in Washington, D.C. and established the prime meridian at zero degrees longitude in Greenwich, England, then Sir Fleming’s 24 time zones were set based on the prime meridian. Thus, UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) was born.
It took some time for the rest of the world to adopt Sir Fleming’s scheme; most of the United States followed the four U.S. time zones by 1895. The Standard Time Act in 1918 formalised this convention. Fast forward to the present time and you’ll see the United States now have nine time zones: Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaska, Hawaii-Aleutian, Samoa, Wake Island, and Guam.
China, which should have five time zones, only utilises one, set to eight hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
Australia uses three time zones, with its central time zone set at a half-hour ahead of its designated time zone. Several countries in the Middle East and South Asia also have half-hour time zones.
The longitudinal lines converge at the poles, so the time zones there are very narrow 15-degree segments. Workers at McMurdo Base in Antarctica simply use UTC time.
Second Life Time
Only one time zone exists in Second Life: Second Life Time (SLT), set to U.S. Pacific Time, which is the time zone of Linden Lab’s headquarters on the West Coast. You can reference SL time to arrange meetups with others, regardless of where you are in your first life. In this unique 3D virtual world, we can be together on a Second Life morning, when it may be late morning in New York, late afternoon in Europe, and around midnight (the next day!) in Australia. Regardless of our local times we can be together, here – that’s the magic of Time in Second Life.
The SL8B celebration officially opens on 20th June at 10:30am SLT; be sure and visit our exhibit at http://slurl.com/secondlife/SL8B%20Spellbound/100/30/22
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