How old are Time zones?

by bulwynkl

Hey hey,

apparently it's daylight savings time again and that got me wondering if the Romans had time zones? Which got me wondering when time zones became a thing...

I mean.. I could google it, but where's the fun in that?

jschooltiger

Hi, you may be interested in this older answer of mine. The short version is that people in antiquity were familiar with the idea that time was different in different places, but until the advent of railroads, this really didn't matter all that much -- people simply didn't travel quickly enough for this to matter, and if they were traveling east or west any change in local time would have been extremely subtle anyhow.