Can anyone give me a simple explanation for why Greenwhich was chosen as 0 degrees longitude?

Answer 1

England's "muscle" didn't really have much to do with it, except as a side effect.

The fact is, in the 19th century the British had the best nautical charts, and most other nations used British charts. And all British charts use Greenwich as the zero point of longitude. It was a practical decision as much as a political one.

Answer 2

It is because the Royal Greenwich Observatory is where the positions of the stars were measured. The time a given star crossed the Greenwich meridian was tabulated. The time the same star crossed the local meridian at some other location was noted. The difference between the two times, multiplied by 15 to convert hours to degrees, gave the difference in longitude between Greenwich and the other location. All longitudes were therefore measured from Greenwich. It was only logical then to make the Greenwich longitude the zero longitude.

Answer 3

In 1884, an International Meridian Conference was held. The meridian which passed through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich was given 0 degrees longitude since it was already used as zero on over 70% of navigation maps at that time, so this decision would benefit the most people.

Answer 4

The International Meridian Conference, held in 1884 in Washington D.C., voted 22 to 1 to use the Greenwich meridian as the zero reference line. It was the line used by the most ship navigators, because England had the best maps and the most map stores world-wide. The "muscle" that England used was really just to keep the most ports open to them, not especially for the maps.

San Domingo, now the Dominican Republic, voted against; France and Brazil abstained.

Answer 5

At the time, Britian was the most powerful country in the world. Greenwich had the royal observatory (which they used to measure time vs astronomical measurements). So this was the logical place to make 0 time, since this was the place that could accurately measure time.

Answer 6

As the United Kingdom grew into an advanced maritime nation, British mariners kept at least one timepiece on GMT in order to calculate their longitude from the Greenwich meridian, which was by convention considered to have longitude zero degrees. This did not affect shipboard time itself, which was still solar time. This, combined with mariners from other nations drawing from Nevil Maskelyne's method of lunar distances based on observations at Greenwich, eventually led to GMT being used world-wide as a reference time independent of location. Most time zones were based upon this reference as a number of hours and half-hours "ahead of GMT" or "behind GMT".

Greenwich Mean Time 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. GMT was adopted on the Isle of Man in 1883, Jersey in 1898 and Guernsey in 1913. Ireland adopted Greenwich Mean Time in 1916, supplanting Dublin Mean Time.[1] Hourly time signals from Greenwich Observatory were first broadcast on 5 February 1924.

The daily rotation of the Earth is somewhat irregular (see ΔT) and is slowing down slightly. Atomic clocks constitute a much more stable timebase. On 1 January 1972, GMT was replaced as the international time reference by Coordinated Universal Time, maintained by an ensemble of atomic clocks around the world. UT1, introduced in 1928, represents earth rotation time. Leap seconds are added to or subtracted from UTC to keep it within 0.9 seconds of UT1.

The international prime meridian is no longer precisely the Greenwich meridian, but remains close to it (5.31"E).

[edit] Time zone

Answer 7

England had the most sea-power ,the biggest navy,the most "mucle" at the time.And they where more than willing to use that mucle to get what they wanted.

Answer 8

they decided it would be best