# Fixed Sunset Time System
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fixed-sunset-time-system/673111
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [November 5, 2013, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fixed-sunset-time-system/673111 "2013-11-05T01:40:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)
#### Post date: [November 5, 2013, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fixed-sunset-time-system/673111/21 "2013-11-05T14:58:41Z")
Lots of information about the Egyptian and Babylonian timekeeping practices:
[http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/15/3364432.htm](http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/15/3364432.htm)
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [November 5, 2013, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fixed-sunset-time-system/673111/22 "2013-11-05T15:25:16Z")
I have a clock on my microwave and on my stove, but the stove one doesn’t display at all unless you push a button, which makes it useless, and the microwave one is such a nuisance to set that I never bother.
And even if we’re not quite at the point of computer clock-saturation yet where this would be practical, we’re getting really close to it.
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### Author:  [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)
#### Post date: [November 5, 2013, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fixed-sunset-time-system/673111/23 "2013-11-05T16:19:10Z")
> [@scr4](#):
>
> How about we compromise and fix the midpoint between sunrise and sunset?
I didn’t know it was broken.
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### Author:  [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)
#### Post date: [November 5, 2013, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fixed-sunset-time-system/673111/24 "2013-11-05T16:45:34Z")
> [@JRDelirious](#):
>
> Instead of 4 time zones across the continental USA you’d end up with hundreds. And I wonder if you’d have places in the high latitudes that would be frozen in civil time.
That’s EXACTLY why the time zones were set up in the first place.
If you’re using astronomical observations to determine your local time, finding noon is a lot easier than sunset- noon’s simply the point at which the sun’s highest in the sky, while sunset would seem to be a lot more hard to define. If you’ve heard of a sextant, finding local noon is one of their primary uses.
Anyway, each locality had their own time based on what was local noon. Railroads ran based on these local times… for the railroad’s headquarters. So if a railroad was headquartered in NYC, noon local time might be 11:57 in Pittsburgh, 11:20 in Chicago, 11:45 in Cincinnati, and so on. So a train showing up at what would be 3:45 in NYC would show “3:45” on the schedule, and passengers would have to determine whether that was 3:42 or 3:30 or whatever based on where they happened to be.
(not coincidentally, this same crazy quilt of local solar time zones is why the Royal Observatory set up Greenwich Mean Time, so mariners would have a single reference to set their chronometers to, in order to determine longitude, which is determined by the difference in local noon and the time on a chronometer set to some reference time)
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### Author:  [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)
#### Post date: [November 5, 2013, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fixed-sunset-time-system/673111/25 "2013-11-05T17:17:49Z")
> [@bob\_2](#):
>
> Truck drivers in the EU, which (I think) covers five time zones, use GMT (although they call it UTC) as the basis for measuring their heavily regulated working hours.
>
> All trucks are fitted with a tachograph which will usually show local time on its face, but records the driving, resting and other work periods in GMT.
GMT is no more. It is UTC.
> [@](#):
>
> [Coordinated Universal Time - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time)
>
> Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is one of several closely related successors to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). For most purposes, UTC is synonymous with GMT, but GMT is no longer precisely defined by the scientific community.
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