How Did Early Navigators Use Time to Determine Their Location?

[DeepSpace9]

So right now it is 11:28 pm local time. I live in central time zone, I know east coast is 1 hour ahead of me. But technically, won't 100 feet to the east and 100 feet to the west both have different times? Even if it is just a half a second difference?

 

[micromass]

Yes. But since this is inconvenient for clocks, we artificially divided the world into timezones. Timezones aren't accurate, but they obviously serve their purpose well.

 

[DeepSpace9]

Thanks for the response, sorry for wasting a thread.

 

[256bits]

Thanks for the response, sorry for wasting a thread.

You should like to know that at one time each town or city had its own local time. Not much of a problem for most of history, since people did not move around that much.

But as the modes of transportation became faster, such as with the advent of the railroad, things really got messed up with the schedules using that local system, and the cure was timezones.

Look into the history of time or something similar to that. It really is quite interesting read on the progression of measuring time from ancient history with sundials and water clocks to the present.

 

[DeepSpace9]

Okay I will do that, thanks.

 

[AlephZero]

Look into the history of time or something similar to that.

Also the history of finding how far east or west one had traveled by sea. Before the days of GPS that depended on exactly the effect you described - carry the time at a known place around with you (i.e. have an accurate clock), measure the local time by observing the sun or stars, and work out where you were from the difference between the two.