Today Google honors Sir Sandford Fleming, (January 7, 1827 – July 22, 1915) with a Google Doodle. Sandford Fleming who became Ser was a Scottish Canadian engineer and inventor. He was born and raised in Scotland, μετανάστευσε ως στην αποικία του Καναδά σε age 18 years.
Sir Sandford Fleming proposed the division of the land into standard time zones, designed Canada's first postage stamp, left a vast number of topographical surveys and maps, designed much of the Intercolonial Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway, and was a founding member of of Royal Society of Canada and founder of the Royal Canadian Institute, a scientific organization in Toronto.
The idea of separating time zones came to him in 1876 when he missed one in Ireland because the printed schedule said pm. instead of a.m. So he proposed a single 24-hour measurement of time, for the whole world, with reference to the center of the Earth, not connected with any of its meridians surfaceof the earth.
At a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute on February 8 1879, associated with the Greenwich anti-meridian (now 180 °), suggested that local time zones should be used locally, but would depend on the single world time which he called Cosmic Time.
He continued to promote this system at major international conferences including the International Meridian Conference of 1884. This conference accepted a different version of Universal Time, but refused to accept the zones, stating that it was a local matter outside its jurisdiction. Nevertheless, by 1929, all major countries in the world had adopted time zones.
With information from WikiPedia
