The history of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England
By: Carey Howard
Submitted: 2010-06-13 20:53:15 | Word Count: 483
The "Age of Sail" refers to a time amount in which the exploration of the world, in an effort to expand trade, began to form the world "smaller." Vasco De Gama discovered a trade route from Europe to India, whereas Christopher Columbus discovered one from Europe to the Americas. Distance was slowly becoming irrelevant, near to trade and commerce.
Some years later, Ferdinand Magellan created plans to circumnavigate the complete world. Throughout one in all his journeys, his men landed in Spain for a stopover. To their amazement, they discovered that even once keeping meticulous travel logs, their timeline differed from those on land by one day. They were thus excited by this that they sent an envoy to the Pope to clarify the reasoning behind this phenomenon. At this time, it became obvious that some sort of International Date Line would be necessary to coordinate nautical pursuits.
In 1675, Great Britain had become quite advanced in its nautical exploits, therefore King Charles established the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in an attempt to check timekeeping, navigation and the determination of star positions. Charles additionally created a brand new position, that of astronomer royal', a title that each head of the Observatory held till 1972.
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Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Observatory began publishing "The Nautical Almanac"; as a result of of the almanac's popularity, Greenwich Mean Time was established. In a trial to synchronize shipments across different time zones, the prime meridian of Earth, or longitude zero, was designated at the Observatory, and designated "Greenwich Mean Time". GMT was used as a reference purpose for ships, even though the timepieces on their vessels reflected the time relevant to the situation of the ship itself. All other time zones were called either being prior GMT or behind it. The International Date Line was determined to be exactly a hundred and eighty degrees from the zero meridian and was formally established as such at the 1884 International Meridian Conference held in Washington D.C at the request of then US President Arthur.
While the first purpose at inception was to excellent the "art of navigation", the Observatory was additionally involved in learning the solar systems and therefore the milky manner galaxy, and maintaining the worldwide time zone tables.
In 1833, astronomer royal John Pond installed a time ball, in an effort to assist synchronize clocks to GMT. Each day the ball still drops at one:00 (13:00).
Though the placement of the Observatory has modified, the zero (prime) meridian continues to be at the old Greenwich location.
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