428 Transactions. — Chemistry and Physics. 



Art. LV. — On Neiv Zealand Mean Time, and on the Longi- 

 tude of the Colonial Observatory , Wellington ; tvith a Note 

 on the Universal Time Question. 



By Thomas King, Transit Observer, Colonial Observatory. 

 [Bead before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 18th March, 1903.] 



(A.) New Zealand Mean Time. 



The public attention which has been given of late to the 

 international movement in favour of the adoption of what is 

 known as the universal or standard time svstem — an ex- 

 tremely convenient scheme for co-ordinating the various 

 clock-times of the world — seems to make it worth while 

 telling how New Zealand settled the question of time-simplifi- 

 cation for herself before any proposals for a change had begun 

 to be agitated elsewhere. It is not as commonly understood 

 as it should be that, in arranging a time-reckoning for her 

 own use, this colony as early as 1868 fixed upon practically 

 the very principle which was afterwards embodied in the 

 reform in question, and that she was thus, apparently, the 

 first country in the world to take up the improved system.* 

 It is one of the purposes of the present paper to explain how 

 this came to pass. 



The question has once before been before this Society, for 

 at a meeting held on the 12th October, 1868, it was dealt 

 with by Dr. (now Sir James) Hector in a paper which will be 

 referred to presently.! But that was a good long while ago, 

 and in the interval which has elapsed the inevitable oblivion 

 has overtaken the work of those early days. Yet the action 

 of our colony in this matter is not without a certain modest 

 importance for us ; and, as the recent progress of the reform in 

 other countries has lent the subject an interest wider than that 

 which it could originally claim, I venture to hope that in dis- 

 cussing it now I shall not be considered open to the charge of 

 needlessly reviving an old story. 



In the first stages of the colony's existence, and for a con- 

 siderable period afterwards, no special need was felt for a 

 general system of time-observance. Each district seems to 

 to have kept the approximate local mean solar time of its 



* See " The Observatory " for July, 1901, vol. xxiv., p. 291, paragraph 

 on " The Time of New Zealand." 



t " On New Zealand Mean Time " (Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol. i., p. 48; 

 second edition, p. 451). 



