1899.] R. D. Oklhfim— On Time in TnJta. 53 



considered as a drawback ends. On the other hand we sliould no longer have 

 the clock outside the General Post Office pointing to one time, and that on 

 the Howrah platform pointing to another. The traveller would no longer 

 have to make an intricate calculation to find out at what time (local) he 

 would have to leave his house to catch a train which departs at another 

 time (Madras). If he set sail for Burma, or went up the river to Assam 

 he would not need, on arrival at his destination, to make anxious enquiries 

 as to the time in use there, for it would be exactly the same as what hi.s 

 watch showed ; and if he travelled in the other direction to Madras, Bombay 

 or Delhi, he would only have to remember that the time there was exactly 

 an hour slow of his watch. 



The benefit would by no means be confined to travellers. The merchant 

 in his office, receiving a telegram from London, would know by a glance at 

 his watch, exactly 6 hom-s fast of Greenwich, how long the telegram had 

 taken in transit. If it were from Berlin or Home the difference in time 

 would be five ; if from New York, ten hours. The shipmaster in the 

 Hooghly, seeing the time-ball drop, would know that it was exactly 7 a. m. 

 by Greenwich time, and determine the error of his chronometer at a glance, 

 and without any need for calculation. And so in every branch of com- 

 mercial or social intercourse, where time has to be considered, the advan- 

 tages of the adoption of standard time would be encountered at every turn. 



If this is true of the ordinary intercourse of man with man, it is 

 especially true in all scientific investigations where the comparison of time 

 observations at difi:erent places is required. I have myself recently had to 

 deal with a mass of time records referring to the earthquake of 1897, 

 and found that a large number had to be rejected because it was impossible 

 to ascertain what standard of time had been used, while in many others 

 it was only after a large mass of calculations had been gone through that the 

 relation of observations, from different places, to each other could be 

 determined. 



This is an aspect of the question with which this Society is as much 

 concerned as with the general advantages of the adoption of a standard 

 time. It is for this reason that I have drawn up this note for the con- 

 sideration of the Society, and propose that we should memorialise the Govern- 

 ment of India to adopt a standard time for universal use in India. The 

 standard actually adopted is comparatively an immaterial point but, as 

 pointed out above, the balance of advantages lies with Greenwich, as 

 opposed to any local Indian time. 



The means for bringing the standard adopted into general use could 

 be very simple. In India, as elsewhere, the initiative would have to 

 come from the State, and the first step to be taken would be to discontinue 

 the table, occupying 44 pages of print, in the official Telegraph Guide which 



