- Why do we need time zones at all?
- Without time zones, every city would keep its own local solar time, making national and international coordination chaotic. Time zones allow clocks across large regions to be synchronized while keeping noon roughly aligned with the sun overhead, which is the underlying human expectation for how clocks should work.
- Who invented time zones?
- Canadian engineer Sir Sandford Fleming proposed a worldwide system of 24 hourly time zones in 1879. The idea was formalized at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. in 1884, which designated the Greenwich meridian as the prime meridian for the world.
- How many time zones are there?
- There are 24 standard time zones, one for each hour of the day, but the actual number of distinct UTC offsets in use worldwide is closer to 38 — because some countries use half-hour or quarter-hour offsets rather than full hours.
