Last August, on the first day of Ramadan, the largest clock in the world began ticking for the first time. The Mecca Clock, designed to serve as the authoritative timepiece for the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims and positioned at the top of the world’s largest clock tower, poses not only an architectural challenge to England’s iconic Big Ben, but a political one as well. Defying the global agreement to consider Greenwich, England, the zero-point for measuring time and space — based on when the sun crosses over that meridian — the clock was constructed to run not on Greenwich Mean Time but on Mecca Time, with Mecca as prime meridian. This means that the Mecca Clock, and anyone who sets a watch by it, deviates from standard time by roughly 21 minutes.
Time wars
How a huge new clock in Mecca is reviving a century-old clash over what time it is
To most of us, protesting Greenwich Mean Time (or its Greenwich-based modern successor, Universal Coordinated Time) may seem bizarre. Synchronizing every clock on earth to the minute offers innumerable advantages for global communication and travel, and most of us have become accustomed to the ease of moving our hour hands forward or backward based on time zones, which are in turn based on longitudinal distance from Greenwich. But in fact, consensus on world standard time isn’t much more than a century old — and was the subject of protest right from the beginning.
What we all accept as the global standard for time dates back to a meeting held just 127 years ago: the 1884 International Meridian Conference, which was convened not in England but right here in the United States. In the course of the proceedings, representatives from 24 “civilized” nations selected the longitudinal meridian passing through the Greenwich Royal Observatory as the world’s prime meridian, from which time in all nations would be calculated.
This may sound like a rare moment of international consensus amid a moment of otherwise fierce imperial rivalries — a pragmatic and cooperative look ahead to our global, industrial present. But a closer look at the conference archives and at the ensuing decades of protest suggest that the Greenwich-based standard for time has always been a fraught topic. The Mecca Clock is only the latest objection to those who helped to make Greenwich Mean Time synonymous with time itself — and it reminds us that behind what seems like the eternal universal of global time is a tenuous, recent, and human history.
READER COMMENTS »
View reader comments » Comment on this story »