Earth is divided into two main lines – Latitudes and Longitudes. In simple language, “Latitude” is a horizontal line that has the measurement of distance north or south of the Equator while “Longitude” is a vertical line that has the measurement east or west of the prime meridian.
All of these lines in the grid have a number associated with them, so for longitudes, there’s zero point which is also called the ‘prime meridian’ and anywhere to the east or west of the prime meridian, it starts to go from 0 degrees to 180 degrees E or W. And it looks like this.
And for latitudes, there’s a center point which is also called ‘equator’ and anywhere to north or south of the equator, it starts to go from 0 degrees to 90 degrees N or S.
And finding out where the prime meridian should be for latitudes are quite actually easy. As earth have two natural poles – North and South which make for a natural top and bottom of the earth.
And halfway in between those two poles you have these perfect center point ‘the equator’ which is a very natural place to put the zero point and to measure everything from the up and down.
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As prime meridian is arbitrary which means it could be chosen to be anywhere so like who has to say that it couldn’t be in Russia and Moscow could be zero point and everything could go west and east from there or we can consider Japan as the prime meridian.
In fact, a long time ago, that’s how it used to be. Maps were once one of the most esteemed possessions of a navigator.
Going back to the time of the Romans having a map of your surroundings or your enemies’ holdings was vital in gaining an upper hand and so everyone had to choose a zero point and most of them just make their capital or their home base the zero point.
So if you lived in Japan, you would just make Japan the zero point and the rest of the coordinates would be measured against that one zero point which was Japan and same if you lived in France or
Washington DC.
That was fine because back then because countries just fought wars and competed with each other. They weren’t really collaborating or aligning or trading as much as they do today, so everyone could just have their own maps centered on their place and they did just fine.
But then around the 1800s, a few things started to happen that completely changed everything. First countries and empires instead of competing and fighting each other started to actually align with each other and trade and be friends because that’s better for everyone.
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Pairing this with the fact that map-making and sea navigating was becoming like a big industry, it was no longer just the king, ordering maps to be made for there like expeditions but now it was like private businesses and so there was now like a demand for good seafaring maps.
In short, map making was trending but there was one more thing that was happening around that time that was super important which was trains.
These trains were popping up everywhere and they were trending. Because people were able to travel like across the country not just like on their horses but on this whole system of trains where you buy a ticket get on a train and end up somewhere hundreds of miles away.
And you know what trains run on besides coal, is time. By timetables, schedules, passengers will know when their trains going to arrive and when it’s going to leave and when it’s going to get there. Time, some universal set time, the problem is, back in the 1800s there was no universal set time.
Check out this piece of paper.
Today all of these cities and towns would be just on Eastern Standard Time, one-time zone. But back then every time had their own time depending on when it was noon for them if they were a little bit east or a little bit west of there that would be different than in Washington DC.
Total nightmare for Trains, the lifeblood of trains is time and this time mishmash just wasn’t going to work.
So what does all of this have to do with Britain as center of the world, look at this guy?
You probably didn’t know him but he was the US president that no one remembers, this US president in the late 1800s saw a problem with all of this, so he realized that having a bunch of different maps with a bunch of different zero points based on whoever was making it that was a problem.
And he realized that not having a universal time zone or some sort of universal way of making the same time for everyone was also a problem.
So he invited 41 countries to come to Washington DC and to sit around and think and talk about where the zero point should be? Where the center of the world should be?
So that we can measure time as well as navigation and all maps could be normalized to one spot. After the moment of a bunch of delegates sitting around in a room in Washington DC, they came to a vote and they decided unanimously to put the zero line to be right here.
This line if you zoom in goes right through London, England that actually goes through a little outskirts town called Greenwich as Greenwich is the home of the Royal Observatory of the British Empire.
So this would be the place the “Prime Meridian” or the zero point for the entire world east and west would start.
Every country at the conference agreed that this should be the case except for the ‘Dominican Republic’ at that time called ‘Santo Domingo’ they said no they were the one country that didn’t like this proposal.
And France and Brazil actually abstained diplomatically which kind of them was saying like oh, we don’t agree with these. France continued to make their map with Paris as the center point but eventually, they got on board as well.
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So that gets to the crux of my big question why the zero right there which is a bunch of people voted on it but why were they so down with Britain having the zero point being in the center of the world.
Well the answer is because it was 1884 and Britain was just good at the ocean, the British Empire was far the biggest most powerful navy that had the most experienced with maps and ocean-faring.
So it was a kind of natural choice to let Britain, the king of the ocean have this center point and from then on maps started to be drafted with Greenwich the royal observatory as the center point for the east-west divide in the world, over time this exact point exactly where its drawn has shifted a tiny bit because of better tools to measure things.
And so it’s actually alike not literally on the Royal Observatory anymore but it’s effectively in the same place that was drawn in this 1884 conference but they also established that all-time in the entire world would be measured again on the same spot ‘Greenwich’.
Noon at Greenwich Royal Observatory would be the peg against which all other time was set they called this, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
So you end up getting a map like this.
The point of all this is to say that because of this conference in 1884 to reconcile train timetables and to make maps more uniform we now have this navigation and time system that rules our whole world and Britain is just sitting at the center of it.
The British Empire may have fallen and the world has moved on from Britain being the center of the world in a lot of ways but it’s still technically the center of the world in a lot of ways.
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