The day I stood in two hemispheres, cheated the Brits
Jason Offutt
Author’s note: I spent part of a summer teaching in England in 2013 and I’m still cleaning out my notebooks. Here’s one of my last days across the pond.
It was a bit embarrassing that I had to look for something to do during my last few days in London. I mean, what had I missed? I couldn’t have done everything in this nearly 2,000-year-old city, right? As the clock ticked closer to my nine-hour flight home, I realized time was important. I needed to go to the place where time begins – the Flamsteed House in Greenwich.
The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, founded in 1675 by Charles II, is where every day starts. Seriously. By international decree, each day around the globe begins at this one spot in London. Take that in. According to our system of measuring something as obscure as time, every single second starts at this one building. I had to take a field trip to the Time Factory.
The Greenwich observatory is home to the Prime Meridian. A meridian is a longitudinal line that splits the Earth north/south into the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Although there is only one Equator, which splits the world into the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, there are plenty of north/south meridians around the world.
Cartographer Gerardus Mercator, born 1512 in what is today Belgium, placed the first meridian through the Canary Islands. Others were placed through Paris, the Bering Strait, Philadelphia, Brussels, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Warsaw, Jerusalem, Mecca, and the Great Pyramid of Giza. The major problem with all of these sites is that not one of them was in England.
While the Rev. Dr. Nevil Maskelyne served as English Astronomer Royal (1765 to 1811), he based his meridian math on where he worked, at the Royal Observatory. Given the fact that at that time the British Empire controlled one quarter of the entire world, 22 countries voted in 1884 to place the official Prime Meridian at the Greenwich observatory because they didn’t want Britain to hurt them.
Well, except the French. The French continued to use the Paris Meridian because, well, they’re French. In 1911 the Meridian Conference – including France – agreed Greenwich was the starting point for time.
The Flamsteed House sits on a hill atop the 183-acre Greenwich Park, which dates to 1427. The house is an unassuming brick building enclosed by a black iron fence put there to keep out people who didn’t want to pay £7 ($9.07) to see the well-marked Prime Meridian line, the line that marks the start of every single day. People like me.
The path I was on continued upward toward the house where tourists plop down seven quid to wind around the observatory grounds to eventually stand on a line. An important line, but a line nonetheless.
As I stood there, waiting my turn, a gate beside me swung open, and I politely held it for a nice Japanese family who made the mistake of leaving the observatory while I was close by. I snuck in through the exit, straddled the well-marked Prime Meridian line, and nabbed a picture before I popped off to the nearest pub.
Yep, I’ve stood in two hemispheres at the same time and I cheated the British government out of £7.
Of course, as an American, I don’t feel guilty about that. Not one bit.
Find out about everything Jason at jasonoffutt.com.
