How long have time zones been around and why do they exist?
Blame the railroads and their desire to keep trains from occupying the same track at the same time.
Yes. Time zones weren’t necessary until there were railroads; every town had their own local time and it didn’t matter, since travel was slow and a few minutes either way didn’t make any difference.
Are you talking about the time zones in the US or globally? I think the latter is rather obvious.
LMWTFY: Time zone - Wikipedia
Exactly. Once there were reliable watches and you could be in a town 100 miles away in a few hours, it was a good idea if everyone agreed on the same time. If you ran something that needed to rely on schedules all over the map, the correct time everywhere was important. Once you had trains that departed on schedules and arrived on schedules, and met other trains, etc. - you need to be accurate within minutes, just looking at the sun and setting the town hall clock tower from “it looks like it’s at its peak” wasn’t good enough. Time to the minute became more important.
And of course, once everyone agreed on a single time, if your country was too big, you realized that noon in Boston or Halifax did not mean noon in Chicago or Winnipeg, let alone San Francisco or Vancouver. No surprise then that a Canadian invented standard time.
How do you mean that? The only alternatives would be every town having its own local time, or everyone on the planet having the same time. Either one is catastrophic.
Not so much. China has adopted one time zone for the whole country even though a similar range of longitudes elsewhere on the planet is typically occupied by three time zones. They seem to make it work just fine. You would simply get used to the notion that 0300 is lunchtime where you live, while your great aunt in the kingdom of Wopwop is just getting up. She usually has lunch at 0900.
Yeah, I have a suspicion that if everyone had the same time, people would get phonecalls in the middle of the night from people who didn’t understand that just because it’s the middle of the afternoon at your 1700, doesn’t mean that’s true for everyone.
people worldwide do use GMT for their time, at least in certain circumstances, throughout the day. you just know what local events happens at particular times.
My father called EST “railroad time”. He remembered when the town clock in Media, PA was 3 minutes behind the clocks in Philly.
Well…
This is China we’re talking about, so I need some convincing that the average Chinese citizen thinks it does work just fine. I kinda suspect that once enough of the old hardline commies die off, they’ll probably divide the country up into time zones, just like the US, Russia, and Canada do.
As already pointed out there’s nothing catastrophic about using a universal time, it just changes how we use that time. The reason we instead have a compromise between local solar time and complete clock-unification is the lack of a desire to give up the cultural aspects. 12 noon is supposed to be the time that the sun is the highest in the sky. If you’re at the western edge of a time-zone during DST, or even worse, in one of the oddly defined time zones, that’s not true, but at least the sun will be high in the sky. With time zones an expression like working 9 to 5 makes sense everywhere, instead of being an anachronism or GMT local imperialism. And since all you have to do to make a time reference universally applicable while still being locally “valid” is to include the time zone offset, it doesn’t make sense to give up those benefits.
Lunchtime is 3 a.m. in eastern China? 
Those of us who ever worked the graveyard shift are very familiar with this. A coworker on another shift wanted me to do some errands for him, because “after all, you’re home all day.”
Historically, people in China would have moved around much less and have had comparatively little reason to deal with people in what would be other time zones. Even if you get used to the local conventions for what happens when, it becomes difficult if you are trying to schedule a business call and you don’t have a good idea of when your contact may be going out to lunch (or going home).
In commie China, the clocks set you.
A universal time scheme starts to fall apart if you were to use it for the entire globe though. It’s not really a big deal to start waking up at “3am” and eat lunch at “9am”. It is a big deal to have it change from Monday to Tuesday in the middle of the work day.
Absolutely. It goes double if you’ve ever “worked at home.” I put it in quotes because even though your employer pays you, people think that since you are at home you are just jerking off, drinking whiskey, then jerking off again, then drinking whiskey in one hand while jerking off with the other. They think that you are free to watch kids, wash the car, go to the grocery store, re-roof the house, etc.
But back to the OP, I don’t think that a universal time zone would work. We just aren’t accustomed to the sun setting at 1pm, for example. The locals would want to change that.