Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/820

800 that there is less risk of its being overlooked. The natural inference from this is that one time-reckoning should be used throughout the whole country, and thus we are led to look forward to the adoption in the near future of a national standard time, six hours slow by Greenwich, for railways and telegraphs throughout North America.

We may then naturally expect that by the same process which we have witnessed in England, France, Italy, Sweden, and other countries, railway-time will eventually regulate all the affairs of ordinary life. There may of course be legal difficulties arising from the change of time-reckoning, and probably in the first instance local time would be held to be the legal time unless otherwise specified.

It seems certain that when a single standard of time has been adopted by the railways throughout such a large tract of country as North America, where we have a difference of local times exceeding five hours, the transition to universal time will be but a small step.

But it is when we come to consider the influence of telegraphs on business life, an influence which is constantly exercised, and which is year by year increasing, that the necessity for a universal or world time becomes even more apparent. As far as railways are concerned, each country has its own system, which is to a certain extent complete in itself, though even in the case of railways the rapidly increasing intercommunication between different countries makes the transition in time-reckoning on crossing the frontier more and more inconvenient. Telegraphs, however, take no account of the time kept in the countries through which they pass, and the question, as far as they are concerned, resolves itself into the selection of that system of time-reckoning which will give least trouble to those who use them.

For the time which is thus proposed for eventual adoption throughout the world, various names have been suggested. But whether we call it Universal, Cosmic, Terrestrial, or, what seems to me best of all, World Time, I think we may look forward to its adoption for many purposes of life in the near future.

The question, however, arises as to the starting-point for the universal or world day. Assuming that, as decided by the great majority of the delegates at Washington, it is to be based on the meridian of Greenwich, it has still to be settled whether the world day is to begin at midnight or noon of that meridian. The astronomers at Rome decided, by a majority of twenty-two to eight, in favor of the day commencing at Greenwich noon, that is, of making the day throughout Europe begin about midday. However natural it might be for a body of astronomers to propose that their own peculiar and rather inconvenient time-reckoning should be imposed on the general public, it seems safe to predict that a world day which commenced in the middle of their busiest hours would not be accepted by business men. In fact, the idea on which this proposal was founded was that universal