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About Time in United Kingdom

The Telescope That Became the Center of the World's Clocks

Every time zone on Earth is measured relative to a single line that runs through a telescope in southeast London. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich was founded by King Charles II in 1675 specifically to solve the problem of measuring longitude at sea, and astronomers there spent two centuries recording the precise moments when stars crossed overhead to build increasingly accurate star charts for navigation. By the 1880s, more than two thirds of the world's ships were already using the Greenwich meridian as their reference line for zero degrees longitude simply because British naval charts were so widely used, even though other nations still measured their own maps from meridians in Paris, Rome, or Washington.

That informal dominance became official at the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington, D.C. in October 1884 at the invitation of U.S. President Chester A. Arthur. Forty one delegates from twenty five nations debated for weeks before twenty two of the twenty five countries present voted to designate the line running through the Airy Transit Circle telescope at Greenwich as the world's prime meridian, the zero point from which every other time zone on the planet is still calculated today. France abstained from the vote and continued using its own Paris meridian on French maps for nearly three more decades, only switching to Greenwich time in 1911. A brass strip still marks the historic line in the Observatory's courtyard, though modern satellite measurements published in 2015 revealed that the true zero degree meridian defined by GPS actually sits about 102 meters to the east of that famous mark.

The September That Never Happened

For eleven days in September 1752, nothing officially happened in Britain and its empire. Parliament's Calendar Act ordered that Wednesday, September 2nd, 1752 would be directly followed by Thursday, September 14th, as Britain finally abandoned the old Julian calendar in favor of the Gregorian calendar most of Catholic Europe had already been using since 1582. The Julian system, dating back to Julius Caesar, had drifted out of sync with the actual solar year by about eleven days over the centuries, and Britain, a staunchly Protestant nation deeply suspicious of anything associated with the Pope who introduced the Gregorian reform, had simply refused to fix the problem for a hundred and seventy years after everyone else.

Popular legend holds that confused and angry crowds rioted in the streets chanting Give Us Our Eleven Days, convinced the government had somehow stolen nearly two weeks of their lives. Modern historians now regard this as a myth, traced back to a satirical 1755 election painting by artist William Hogarth that showed a stolen political banner bearing that slogan, evidence of a heated political debate rather than genuine civil unrest. One documented and rather more charming episode from the changeover involves a man named William Willett of Endon, who wagered he could dance continuously for twelve days, began dancing on September 2nd, danced through the night, and by the calendar's own logic was able to stop the very next morning, September 14th, and collect his winnings for a bet technically fulfilled in a single night's sleep.

The Clock Regulated by Old Pennies

High above the Houses of Parliament, the mechanism known worldwide as Big Ben has been kept accurate for over 160 years using a method that seems almost comically low tech for a clock renowned for its precision. Astronomer Royal Sir George Airy set an extraordinarily demanding standard when the Great Clock was commissioned in the 1850s, requiring its first strike each hour to be accurate to within one second and its performance checked against the Royal Observatory by telegraph twice daily. Clockmaker Edward John Dent won the commission, and after his death in 1853 his stepson Frederick completed construction, but it was amateur horologist Edmund Beckett Denison, later ennobled as Lord Grimthorpe, who solved the accuracy problem by inventing what became known as the double three legged gravity escapement, a mechanism that kept the clock's massive 13 foot pendulum swinging in perfect rhythm regardless of wind pressure battering the tower's four faces.

The clock finally began keeping time on May 31, 1859, and to this day its keepers fine tune its accuracy using a small stack of pre decimalization pennies, coins taken out of circulation in the United Kingdom in 1971, resting on a shelf on top of the pendulum. Adding a single penny very slightly raises the pendulum's center of mass, which is enough to make the clock gain precisely two fifths of a second over the next 24 hours, while removing one has the opposite effect, a solution so simple and so effective that clock keepers have never found a reason to replace it with anything more modern.

The Man Who Never Saw His Own Idea Adopted

British Summer Time exists because of a builder named William Willett, who became convinced during early morning horseback rides around 1905 that Britain was wasting hours of usable daylight every summer morning while people slept through it. Willett spent years campaigning for Parliament to shift the nation's clocks forward each summer, originally proposing a gradual eighty minute shift carried out in twenty minute increments across four separate Sundays in April, but he died in early 1915, months before the Summer Time Act of 1916 finally passed and clocks were first moved forward on May 21st that year, meaning the man most responsible for British Summer Time never once experienced it in his own lifetime.

The country pushed the idea furthest during the Second World War, when clocks were deliberately never turned back at the end of summer 1940, then advanced by a further hour each spring from 1941 through 1945, putting Britain a full two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time under a scheme called British Double Summer Time. The extra hour of evening daylight helped conserve fuel used for lighting and gave people more time to reach home before nightly blackout restrictions began, with the wartime scheme finally unwound in stages during the summer and autumn of 1945. A later peacetime experiment tried keeping Britain permanently on summer time between 1968 and 1971, but the government abandoned it after persistent complaints, particularly from Scotland, where winter sunrise sometimes did not arrive until close to nine in the morning under the shifted clocks.

Dialing T I M to Hear a Human Voice Announce the Second

Long before smartphones displayed the time automatically, millions of Britons picked up a telephone and dialed three letters, T, I, M, spelling out the word time on their rotary dial, to hear a calm recorded voice recite the hour down to the exact second. The service launched in London on July 24, 1936, built by Post Office engineers at Dollis Hill using time announcements recorded on rotating glass discs and automatically synchronized against Greenwich time signals, and it registered nearly 13 million calls in its very first year despite serving only the London area before going fully national six years later.

The voice behind the service, chosen through a national competition among the country's own telephone operators, became something of a minor celebrity in its own right. London telephonist Jane Cain won the original 1936 competition and remained the voice of TIM for twenty seven years until 1963, when supervisor Pat Simmons took over, and the tradition of a so called Golden Voice continued until 1985, when engineer Brian Cobby became the first man selected for the role, an on air changeover formally marked by Doctor Who actor Colin Baker, whose own character was famous for periodically regenerating into an entirely new body. Officially renamed Timeline but still known to most of the country simply as TIM, the service continues to answer tens of millions of calls every year from people who, even in an age of internet connected devices, still want to hear a human voice confirm the precise moment they are living in.

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