Rob Seaman wrote: >Of course, civilians will continue to confuse GMT with UTC, so Greenwich >Mean Time would have to go, too. "London Mean Time" will be unambiguous:
No it wouldn't. Today we would probably expect "London Mean Time" to refer to mean solar time on the Greenwich meridian, or at least somewhere within a second of that. But predating the Greenwich meridian there was a different meridian used for official purposes in London, marked by an obelisk at Kew, with the time scale realised by Kew Observatory. It's about 0 deg 18' 45" (75 s of time) west of the Greenwich meridian. "London Mean Time" could well refer to that. The Kew meridian is described by a comment in the Olson timezone database, which duly ascribes London a time scale of UT-00:01:15 prior to 1847. (1847 predates the present Greenwich meridian, but there was already *a* Greenwich meridian a few metres from the canonical one, and Olson doesn't work to sufficient resolution to distinguish them.) It quotes from the Independent newspaper of 1994-01-17. -zefram _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
