The Scranton tribune. [volume] (Scranton, Pa.) 1891-1910, 1899-09-05
NUMEROUS WAYS Of
RECKONING TIME
CUSTOMS VARY IN DIFFERENT
COUNTRIES.
Firing a Noon Gun at Teheran, Per-
slavery Good Time in Africa if
There Is a Telegraph Line to
Greenwhich-Four Kinds of Rail-
road Time in Ell Paso.

From the New York Sun.
The ordinary method of reckoning
time in Mohammcdan countries is from
sunset to sunset. Twelve o'clock Is at
sunset. and this is the beginning of
the day. Two periods of twelve hours
then pass till the next sunset,
whereupon everybody sets his watch,
II he has one, backward or forward,
according to the season. OF course,
accurate time is impossible under such
a system The telegraphs and rail-
roads in Syria. for example, keep any
thing but exact time. though it might
be procured from the observatory at
Beyrout, which uses its mean time. In
Teheran. Persia, a midday gun is fired
by the time shown on dial, and this
in spite Of the fact that the correct
local mean time might be procured at
the telegraph office. which is regulated
daily by time signal from Greenwich
and is the time standard for all teie-
graphic business. But the merchants
and the street car company keep gun
time, and the railroad trains do not
seem to require time table at all, as
they seldom start until full or required
to start by government order.
There are out of the way parts of the
world that keep very good time, be-
cause their clocks are regulated by
telegraph from Greenwich and then
the Greenwich mean time is reduced to
local time according to longitude diff
ference. Thus, at Lagos and the Gold
Coast, West Africa, the local time is
checked daily by telegraph from
Greenwich and transmitted to all the
telegraph offices in the colonies. The
time at Accra is only fortysiX seconds
slower than that of Greenwich and is
the time used throughout the Gold
Coast.
IN CHINA.
Most any sort of time is kept in
China. As a rule, the Chinese use an
apparent sun time obtained from sun
dials. The foreigners at the ports on
the coast use an approximate local
time calculated from the Shanghai
time supplied by the telegraph COM
panieS. In the great city of TientsEi,
with a million inhabitants the time is
determined by the municipal chrono-
meter, which is the town-hall clock. 1t
is supposed to be regulated every Sat
urday, when the community may set
their watches, but it has been known
to be in error at least three minutes
Last December was the time when
all the towns in Colombia were ex-
pected, thereafter, to use the time of
Bogota, the capital With this respon-
sibility upon them it is hoped that the
public clocks of that city will improve
in their timekeeping, for visitors at
Bogota say it is nothing unusual for
the public clocks to disagree by fully
a quarter of an hour.
In India, the standard time for the
whole Of the peninsula is the mean
time Of the Madras Observatory and
this time is used on through lines of
railroad, and in recording the time of
sending kilograms to foreign countries.
Local time is, however, used i'm most
towns and villages, and it is announced
by clocks striking, gongs. bells and
guns, the signals being given from
churches, treasury buildings, forts and
telegraph offices. The local clocks are
set daily by the time telegraphed from
Madras, and each telegraph office has
a closely printed table, filling about
fifty pages, giving the difference be
tween Madras and local time for all
the government telegraph offices in In
dia.
TWO STANDARDS.
Not a few countries constantly use
two standards of time. This is not
troublesome at all when we consider
that, before the adoption of the hour
zones, the railroads across our own
continent employed about seventy
standards of time in making up their
time tables. Railroads and telegraphs
for all other purposes the official time