The Evolution of Time!

Time is precious, but why is it so? If not visible through naked eyes, what time do we talk about? Years ago India sorted this issue by adopting a standard measure to calculate this 'time'.

What time is it?; Image Source: Labroots

Ironically time has evolved over a period of time.

It is a known fact that ancient scriptures hold a very special place in establishing multiple perceptive theories of the universe, but one thing still remains common in all. None of them could explain the concept of time, for it has always remained unpredictable, unexplainable, and unquestionable.

For a major part of history, different places used different devices to determine the time of their region, like, in 1773, Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh of Jaipur constructed Jantar Mantar, a large sundial to calculate local time.

In this journey of understanding the concept of time, humans traveled from observing planetary movements to either calculating it in one respiratory cycle or breaking the period of sunrise and sunset for that sake. Even tools like waterclocks, sandglasses, stars' position, or candles have been used for quite a long period of time. Yet none of them provided an accuracy like the one we have today.

Based on these ancient techniques, years of hard work, innovation, calculating, and analyzing the structure of time resulted in a more convenient and easier method to understand this system. Hence, this evolution is clearly a result of human inventions as they created more and never ran out of this time.

Interestingly, the necessity to establish a uniform system of time began when the mobilization of people around the globe increased. Railways played a major role in this, as it was highly essential to synchronize the trains with the local time of every said destination.

The journey of establishing this whole system, with accuracy, didn't stop until we found a standard tool for its measurement. The primary goal was to discover a time that applies to every corner of the globe using the same method. Due to the globe's rotation and the sun's direction on all sides, this couldn't be done.

Thus Greenwich Mean Time was born. Based primarily on the prime meridian, this 0-degree longitude geographically divides the earth into two halves based on the hemispheres. So, from Greenwich, all of the world's time zones were calculated based on how the earth rotated from east to west.

The first local time zone in the world, based on GMT, was adopted by Britain in the 1800s after it began connecting train routes. Following its introduction, the concept of national clock time spread quickly and reached India. As a result of railway development during British rule, India used GMT for all of its route-based locations: Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras - for the first time.

Today as we live much of our lives using these clocks and calendars, it was in 1947 that we, Indians could officially call this one standard time as ours. One that runs the same throughout the Indian Subcontinent. One that is derived from the geographical position of India on a world map.

In addition to the fact that India became a sovereign country, a common time zone made it easy to communicate with anyone in the world.

Hence, 75 years from now, India embraced its time which runs five and half-hour ahead of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). It is for the same reason that we always put UTC+5:30 on our devices since there are differences in timing for every continent. Mumbai and Kolkata were initially exempt because of their different timing with respect to the prime meridian, but later Allahabad was selected as the central meridian of India.

On 1st September 1947, the Indian Government officially adopted its own time distinct from the world. It is computed from the Clock tower situated in Mirzapur, where the nearest meridian passing from east of Allahabad is located.

Known as Indian Standard Time (IST) it allows different countries to follow different times simultaneously. Because Gujarat and Assam have different time zones within India, they can use the same time. Considering that such differences are merely dependent on the revolution of the earth around the sun, these calculations procedure is affected by the east-west distance. So it becomes necessary to maintain a national time clock.

Consequently, a standard time for India was declared on this day. Yes, this is intriguing to know how humans created 'time', but it is also true that time is one of the greatest inventions in the history of humans.