From Bombay to New York: A Brief History of How the World Struggled to Standardize Time Internationally
- Liz Publika
- Jul 8
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 14
by Liz Publika
Your international flight is leaving on Tuesday. You know that you’ll be travelling for roughly 24 hours but somehow your ticket shows you’ll still land on a Tuesday. Your family is asking about the best time to connect with you. Your head doesn’t compute, so you take out your phone, navigate to the clock app, and enter the city you’ll be arriving in. You update the family after that. In a world of digital watches, on-demand answers, and technology that connects to a satellite from the palm of your hand, we forget how much the world struggled to standardize time internationally, fairly recently.
The aforementioned flight is taking you east across the International Date Line, an imaginary line on the Earth’s surface that zigzags through the Pacific Ocean, mostly along the 180° line of longitude. It marks the boundary where one calendar day ends and the next begins. Crossing it eastward gifts you an extra day, while crossing it westward steals one. The Date Line was established at the 1884 International Meridian Conference and laid the groundwork for time zones, but didn’t quite get there. Still, it’s crazy to think that happened less than 150 years ago.
International time scheduling — before standardized time zones, computers, and AI — relied on telegraph networks, mechanical calculation, and human-operated timetables, all coordinated through international agreements and manual planning. In 1883, just one year before the International Meridian Conference, U.S. and Canadian railways adopted five standardized time zones to replace the multiplicity of local times in communities across the continent, thus introducing “railroad time.” But anything that went longer distances was harder to standardize.
That, though, didn’t mean efforts weren’t made before that. The Industrial Revolution was changing everything. The rise of steamships, railways, and telegraphy, was slowly forcing a shift toward unified time because long-distance travel and communication required coherent schedules that spanned large territories. In 1870, the expansive colonial British Empire tried to force its Indian colonies to adopt Madras Time, the standard the colonial railways already used. It didn’t work. Not then, not later — when the empire tried again in 1881.
One of the primary reasons for the challenge was that many places around the world were still operating on solar time. “Noon on a well-made, properly paced sundial is whenever the sun is highest right there. The advent of mechanical timekeeping in the Middle Ages didn't change that,” writes Randy Alfred in Wired. “Noon in your town was whenever the sun was highest right there. If that meant that noon in a town a hundred miles away might be a few minutes ahead or behind your local noon, big deal. You couldn't get there fast enough for it to matter.”
By the mid-19th century, Bombay was already a major city and a vital commerce hub, but it still mostly followed its local solar time, appropriately referred to as “Bombay Time.” When the Brits made their attempts to change that, rather than converting, the residents simply accepted that there would be two different sets of time, largely ignoring the preference of the colonizers. Even the 1883 dispute over which time should be displayed on the giant Big Ben-style clock tower in the city was won by the locals.
This brings us back to the 1884 International Meridian Conference. It was held in Washington, D.C. where 41 delegates from 25 different countries gathered to establish a unified system of longitude and time. Primarily because 2/3 of the world’s shipping charts already relied on British maps, the conference culminated in the adoption of the Greenwich Meridian as the world's standard 0° Prime Meridian, thus laying the groundwork for today's standardized global timekeeping. But this wasn’t the end of the struggle.
Although the International Meridian Conference successfully established the prime meridian, it didn’t actually mandate or enforce a global system of time zones. That was partially because any attempts to vote on local hourly standard offsets were enthusiastically blocked by delegates who passionately argued it was outside the conference's scope. And so, once again, the world couldn’t agree on standardizing time. And, to make matters worse, the world started to toy around with the idea of Daylight Savings Time.
The kicker is that back in 1784, it was none other than Benjamin Franklin who wrote a satirical essay to the Journal of Paris, jokingly suggesting that Parisians wake up earlier to save money on candles. In said essay, he did not propose changing clocks, just people's schedules, but the seed for the eventual switch was planted. It’s not unfair to speculate that due to Franklin’s massive influence, the idea was spread across the world, however unseriously at first. Today, 70 countries worldwide rely on Daylight Savings Time (DST).
It officially started with New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, who proposed a seasonal shift in 1895 so he could have more daylight hours to collect bugs. Then, in 1907, British builder William Willett independently campaigned for a similar shift to save energy; the idea was repeatedly rejected by the British Parliament. The first official use of DST occurred in 1908, when the residents of Port Arthur, Ontario — part of Thunder Bay today — set their clocks 1 hour forward.
To keep up with an increasingly tech-forward world, where fast communications, travel, business relationships, and global cooperation were of growing importance, international scheduling was achieved through carefully coordinated efforts. By the time of the Great War, the need to standardize time was becoming vital. Even before the first international flight ever took place, the rapid development of aviation added urgency to a world that was still struggling to figure out a way to efficiently keep track of time in any uniform way. But it managed, somehow.
Interestingly, it was the Second World War that finally got the world to cooperate on standardization. From coordinating strategic strikes to keeping production running through the night regardless of daylight, the war created a situation where poor synchronization could be deadly. And so the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was implemented as the universal standard for all logs, communications, and orders. Despite this, renegades still refused to conform to the international system.
China, which is fairly equal in size to the United States and technically spans several time zones, operates on one called Beijing Time. Similarly, India officially uses only one time zone across its entire territory, which is Indian Standard Time. And, for a while, North Korea operated on Pyongyang Time, or Korea Standard Time, though it previously observed the same one as Japan (UTC+09:00) due to the Korean Peninsula’s alignment with Japan's time zone, which traces back to the period of Japanese colonial rule in 1912. It has since returned to it.
Still, most of the world opted to standardize, which meant the design of timetables and route maps developed into a distinct visual culture where cartography, typography, and diagrammatic abstraction became artistic practices in their own right. The creative side of this lies in the material and visual culture of time, like maps, charts, printed tables, and diagrams that relay temporal relations as patterns of lines, numbers, and symbols. Taken together, they show that the history of international scheduling is a specialized aesthetic.
Furthermore, peacetime offered artists and theorists the chance to reframe maps, itineraries, and timetables as art, rather than purely functional utilities. Scholarly work on “walking and mapping” and artistic engagement with everyday navigation shows how these operate at the intersection of design, perception, and lived experience. The act of plotting a route — whether for a transit system or a conceptual art project — becomes a way of thinking through space and time, transforming paths and pauses into a visual language on the page.
Note* Image available via Public Domain or Fair Use