One of the best places you should visit is the Royal Observatory, which is the most popular place for the visitors. This is the most important historic scientific sites in the world.
It was founded by King Charles Ⅱ in 1675 by international decree.
This place is so special because it is the official starting point for each new day, year and millennium.Now it is the part of the National Maritime Museum.The Observatory galleries unravel the extraordinary truth of time, space and astronomy. The Planetarium let visitors explore the wonders of the heavens.
King Charles II appointed John Flamsteed as his first Astronomer Royal in 1675.
John Flamsteed
The Observatory was built to improve navigation at sea. It was also required to find the longitude of places, one's exact position east and west while at sea, by astronomical means. The accrate measurement of time was very essential. Therefore the Observatory became generally famous in the 19th century. Although the Observatory made much effort to fix the problems of voyage. For example, disaster at sea killed over 2000 men in 1707.
British Parliament established a panel of experts and decided to offer a massive £20,000 reward (equivalent of £2 million today) to anyone who could solve the problem to find the longitude at sea. In the end, an unknown Yorkshire caropenter and also a clockmaker, John Harrison, solved this problem.
John Harrison
was to change navigation forever.
Today, the Royal Observatory is the source of the Prime Meridian of the world, Longitude 0° 0' 0''. Every place on the Earth is measured in terms of its distance east or west from this line.
Since the late 19th century, Greenwich has served as the base for the calculation of Greenwich Mean Time. Before this, almost every town in the world kept its own local time.
In this way, world trade, trip and communication were very complex. There were no international conventions to set how time should be measured, or when the day would begin and end, or what the length of an hour might be.
The Greenwich Meridian was chosen as the Prime Meridian of the World in 1884. 41 delegates from 25 nations met in Washington DC for the International Meridian Conference. By the end of the conference, Greenwich had won the prize of Longitude 0º by a vote of 22 in favour to 1 against, with two abstentions (France and Brazil).
There were two main reasons why Greenwich was chosen.
- The USA had already chosen Greenwich as the basis for its own national time-zone system.
- At the time, 72% of the world's commerce depended on sea-charts which used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.
Therefore, Greenwich became the center of world time.