Have you ever experienced that your printer got stuck at a piece of paper? What if that happened every time you print? This course explains the importance of technical norms to which engineers abide to, so your printer works more smoothly. Imagine that there were no standards. That is not easy, even if you try. The reason is that a lot of standards are very common to us and are with us for ages. But there are also new standards, new technical agreements, that are created rapidly every day. Did you ever ask yourself how under the hood of your mobile phone, messages are sent other phones? Society would not be like it is today, if there were no technical agreements on how things are working. This course explains how these technical specifications help you and society in general.
Time
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Del curso dictado por EIT Digital
Standardisation
1 calificación
Conoce a los instructores
Jan SmitsProfessor, Legal Master
Innovation Engineering and Information Systems
Welcome with this lecture on Time,
and notably, the necessity to find out what was necessary to standardize time.
First, before we go into the lecture itself,
we will place this lecture against the goals that we are dealing with,
namely, how standards came into being.
Okay now, let's switch to why time standardization was necessary.
Time standardization was necessary, for instance,
when in the mid 1840 1850s,
trains became into a normal use as travel between cities in the UK.
The necessity to have time schedules,
at what time the train would leave,
or at what time the train would arrive,
became very very necessary.
So what happened was, before that,
each city had its own time based on where the sun was at twelve o'clock.
So, they had their own time so to speak.
When you run train schedules,
that's not very handy.
So around 1840, the London Standard Time became the normal time for train stations,
train travelling at a normal time,
standardized time around the UK.
In the USA and Canada,
about 8,000 villages, towns had their own time.
When you were traveling from Detroit to Chicago for instance,
you never knew exactly at what time you're leaving or going,
and when the train would arrive.
You could not go to the station to find out at what time
the train from Chicago was coming into Detroit and things like that.
What they needed, they wanted also a standardized time,
and they did so by mid 1880s,
when they declared November eighteenth at noon,
from then on, we are going to use standardized time.
That meant that the spirits who are ready to find out a bit more about
a worldwide standardization of time because
the necessity grew not only because of the train stations,
but also because there were telegraph cables,
there were steamships crossing the ocean,
and they needed to have a time of departure
and a time of arrival in the ports where the ships were going to.
The telegraph messages, they needed to be sure that
at a certain time a telegraph or a telegram,
the telegraph message had been sent.
So, this synchronization of
time on both sides of the ocean became more and more important.
Because of that, they tried to find out
how then to standardize time all over the world in the same way.
And to be able to do that,
they needed to be sure where to start this division of the globe in different time zones.
So, there was a fight going on,
not a real fight but a fight going on between
France and the UK on where the zero would come.
Because from that zero out,
then the meridian division all over the globe could be made.
At that time, French was used as a diplomatic language but in reality,
the UK ruled the waves,
Britannia rules the waves as we know.
And so, it became clear that the zero was going to be taken from Greenwich,
just outside of London.
The strange thing about this time Treaty of New York in 1884,
is that more or less by accident,
they decided that the globe would be divided into 24 sections of 15 degrees,
each representing one hour with the data border over the Pacific Ocean.
That data border would have been a bit different in
case Paris would have been chosen as the zero,
but the agreement was that the zero Meridian would be the Greenwich Meridian.
And when we go then into how the world looks in the standardized time zones,
you can see it from this map,
that each 15 degrees had its next hour going all over the globe.
Let's say the cutoff of meridian was not equal to borders inferences in Europe.
So the 15 or the meridian going over a borderline which did not fix,
or Poland or Germany we're not going to be cut into into time zones.
So what happened, was that we got time zones according to the borders of a country.
That's more or less all over the world the case.
So, you cannot use the 15 degrees separation as
a very stark border on a sharp difference between one time zone and the other.
Usually it's on the front lines,
the borderlines of the countries.
Okay this lecture was a part of the how time,
and the necessity to standardize time.
So, how Standard Time came into being.
Thank you for watching this lecture,
and the next lecture will deal with telegraphic alphabets.
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