standard time
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standard time
standard time, civil time used within a given time zone. The earth is divided into 24 time zones, each of which is about 15° of longitude wide and corresponds to one hour of time. Within a zone all civil clocks are set to the same local solar time. Adjacent zones typically differ by a whole hour, although there are instances, such as in Newfoundland and South Australia, of half-hour zones. Standard time is based on universal time. Standard time was largely the creation of the Canadian railway engineer Sir Sandford Fleming (1827–1915). Its establishment in the United States was mainly due to the efforts of the educator Charles Dowd and William Allen, secretary of the American Railroad Association. Standard time officially came into existence after a 19-nation White House meeting in 1884, with the prime meridian established at Greenwich, England. In the United States, time zones are regulated by the Dept. of Transportation.
See also daylight saving time.
Bibliography
See C. Blaise, Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time (2001).
standard time
The time in any of the 24 internationally agreed time zones into which the Earth's surface is divided; the primary division is centered on the Greenwich (0° longitude) meridian. All locations within a single zone keep the same time. Zone times differ by a whole number of hours, or in some cases of half hours, from Greenwich mean time. Zones west of the Greenwich zone are behind GMT, those east of it are in front of GMT.Standard Time
(religion, spiritualism, and occult)Before the advent of rapid travel and modern means of long-distance communication, particular localities kept time according to the noontime position of the Sun. Because this varied east or west of any given location, the local time also varied as one traveled east or west. The imposition of today’s standard time zones, in which one must set her or his watch forward or backward as an imaginary line is crossed, is a comparatively recent innovation. To properly cast a horoscope, astrologers must find the “true” local time at which a native was born. In other words, a birth time expressed in standard time must be converted back into local “Sun time.” The more common designation for Sun time is local mean time.
Standard Time
a universal time derived from astronomical observations of the time services of the USSR and the socialist countries participating in the work of the State Time Service of the USSR to obtain the most uniform possible time scale corresponding to the mean rotational velocity of the earth. Standard time was calculated in the period 1953–75 and published in the bulletins of the Interdepartmental Commission of the Unified Time Service Etalonnoe vremia v srednie momenty peredach radiosignalov (Standard Time at Mean Radiosignal Transmission Times). With the introduction of the uniform atomic time scale, the universal time scale lost its significance as a standard.
Since 1975, universal time in the USSR is derived by a statistical probability method and yields information on changes in the rotational velocity of the earth and in the orientation of the earth’s axis in space for periods longer than a week. The findings are published in the bulletin Vsemirnoe vremia (Universal Time) of the Interdepartmental Commission of the Unified Time Service of the Gosstandart (State Committee on Standards) of the USSR.
D. IU. BELOTSERKOVSKII
standard time
[′stan·dərd ′tīm]standard time
