A UN fight over Greenwich Mean Time

When I last checked in on the work of the International Telecommunications Union, the venerable UN body was talking about internet regulation. Now it’s set to debate something arguably more ambitious: how the world measures time. Britain’s Telegraph reports on a fight looming at the ITU over the fate of Greenwich Mean Time: At a ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

When I last checked in on the work of the International Telecommunications Union, the venerable UN body was talking about internet regulation. Now it's set to debate something arguably more ambitious: how the world measures time. Britain's Telegraph reports on a fight looming at the ITU over the fate of Greenwich Mean Time:

When I last checked in on the work of the International Telecommunications Union, the venerable UN body was talking about internet regulation. Now it’s set to debate something arguably more ambitious: how the world measures time. Britain’s Telegraph reports on a fight looming at the ITU over the fate of Greenwich Mean Time:

At a meeting of the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva next week, representatives from 190 countries will gather to vote on whether or not to stop using [Greenwich mean time] and align ourselves strictly with atomic time.

This would mean that every 80 years or so we would move about a minute further away from GMT, the method first adopted in Britain in 1847 and used by the rest of the world before the introduction of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – essentially the same measurement – in 1972.

It would cut the link between our time and the rising and setting of the Sun, and cause us to gradually drift away from Greenwich Mean Time, judged by when the Sun crosses the Greenwich Meridian.

According to the piece, the United States and China have lined up against the UK. For a good survey of how it came to this, see this Richard Cohen article.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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